Financial intermediaries and the diversity of financial capitalism : The case of French mergers and acquisitions[Organisations financières et diversité du capitalisme financier : le cas des fusions-acquisitions en France]

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are important moments in the capital market because they finalize a market arrangement: the capital of an SME or the subsidiary of a group that did not exist as a freely tradable object in a market is endowed with marketable qualities, a financial value, and is the object of a purchase. In this article, we propose a socioeconomic characterization of financial intermediaries across three scales: organizations, practices, and employees. To approach the M&A sector empirically, we used the Carfi database, which identified 363 M&A transactions in 2010 in France. We have added the level of financial organizations to this database. We conducted a multiple correspondence analysis and an agglomerative hierarchical clustering to characterize financial organizations as a social space built based on economic functions, financial practices, and socially situated individuals. We distinguish three forms of financial capitalism: banking capitalism involving European banks, financial capitalism linked to the presence of investment banks from the English-speaking world in particular, and corporate financial capitalism associated with independent advisers.