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This article focuses on chemical retailers Jack and Charles Colbert to, first, show the externalization processes linked to the greening of U.S. industry through stricter consumer and environmental protection regulations and, second, illustrate the limitations of nationally framed environmentalism targeting businesses in a global market. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Colberts traded chemicals that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had banned for use in the United States. They exported them legally to countries where the material was still a permitted commodity—primarily in the global South. Rare interview material illustrates how the exporters justified their unequal business deals by misappropriating the meaning of recycling.

Following some general remarks on the impact of financialization on nonfinancial sectors of the economy, this article identifies common misconceptions about the German and American varieties of capitalism. It then outlines the post-1960 U.S. experience with financialization, including the reasons for the rise of financialization and its main consequences. The article will then look at Germany, a country with a very different entry point into the world of financialization, and ask when and to what degree the concept was adopted. Finally, a detailed case study of Siemens—one of Germany's largest industrial concerns—will explore how this icon of Germany Inc. adapted to the demands of financialization and coped with the external changes caused by globalization, deregulation, and digitalization.

Using newly collected patent assignment data for late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany and a standard econometric approach from the international trade literature—the gravity model—we demonstrate the existence of border effects on a historical technology market. We show that the geographic distance between assignor and assignee negatively affected the probability of patent assignments, as well as the fact that a state or international border separated the two contracting parties. Surprisingly, we show that the effect of a state border within Germany was nearly as large as the effect of an international border. This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively. Peer Reviewed