The words come from Costas Lapavitsas, a professor of economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and the author of a meticulous analysis of financialization called Profiting without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All (Verso). Costas Lapavitsas:
Financialization represents a new historical period in the development of capitalism. Marxist political economy typically recognizes three great periods: laissez-faire capitalism around the middle of the 19th century, monopoly capitalism toward the end of the 19th century and imperialism that lasted perhaps until the Second World War. The 70 years since the war have been very difficult to categorize, not least because of the extraordinary Long Boom that lasted until the early 1970s, with unprecedented growth rates, rising incomes and greater equality. The Long Boom has been followed by four decades of indifferent growth, often stagnant incomes and rising inequality. In my view, financialization is a term that adequately characterizes this period. Its dominant feature has been the extraordinary rise of finance, which has come to penetrate areas of economic and social activity previously relatively distant to it.
This explanation takes us all the way to 2008. After that year, neoliberalism (the social form) and neoclassical economics (the academic form) died but returned as zombies. No one believes in these things or ideas anymore, but they are very much alive, very effective, and indeed making loads of money for a tiny group of people on this planet. This is the land of the aftermath.