Finance Capital, monopoly industrial capital which has merged with monopoly bank capital. The emergence of finance capital, leading to the appearance of the financial oligarchy is one of the main indicators of imperialism. Finance capital formed in the late 19 thearly 20th centuries as a result of the high concentration of capital in production and banking. "The concentration of production; the monopolies arising therefrom; the merging or coalescence of the banks with industry—such is the history of the rise of financial capital and such is the content of that concept.” (V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 22, p. 226.) Making use of free finances, the banks began to give industrial enterprises not only short-term but also long-term credits, thus acquiring an opportunity of influencing the course of their operation and, in some cases, determining their destiny. The banks’ finances were also transferred into industry through buying and selling shares and organising a holding system, which allows one with a relatively small amount of bank capital to control far bigger sums of capital owned by others by the possession of the controlling block of shares. Alongside this a process is under way in which big banks swallow small banks and form monopoly bank amalgamations—cartels, syndicates and trusts. A personal union, when one person combines in his hands directorships in both bank and industrial monopolies, plays an essential role in this process. One of the new forms of coalescence are the trust operations in which banks are entrusted by proxy with the control of large shares. National and international financial-monopoly groups uniting monopolies of different economic spheres is the modern organisational form of the domination of finance capital. Having subordinated the economy to their will, the finance capitalist magnates steer also the political course of the capitalist countries.