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The ‘zombie’ literature emphasizes the financial characteristics of firms and focuses on financial channels to explain their rise. This is incomplete because it conflates together firms with very different productive characteristics. Drawing on Marx and Minsky’s insights, we build a taxonomy of firms showing both their productive and financial characteristics based on the rate of profit of enterprise and the interplay between its three determinants: the profit rate, the difference between the profit and the interest rate, and the leverage ratio. Considering the different possible combinations of these variables, we classify firms into seven types: normal and regular small capitals (hedge finance); speculative small, super small, and leveraged small capitals (speculative finance); and financially stressed small and zombie capitals (Ponzi finance). We show the composition and evolution of U.S. listed firms as well as relevant descriptive statistics by type of firm from 1950 to 2019. Our main finding is that the principal problem of U.S. firms is productive, not financial, as there is a high share of firms with increasingly negative profitability even before the payment of interest and despite having relatively low leverage.

Not all zombies are created equal. A Marxist-Minskyan taxonomy of firms: United States, 1950-2019