Sabine Montagne joined CNRS as research fellow, at University Paris Dauphine, IRISSO (Interdisciplinary Research Institute in Social Sciences) in 2004, having worked previously for an investment bank in Paris for ten years and for a government economic agency for six years. Graduated from an engineering school (“grande école d’ingénieur”), l’Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne, in1986, she holds a PhD in economics from Université Paris-Nanterre (2003) and a “habilitation à diriger des recherches” (HdR, French exam after the PhD) in sociology from Université St Quentin en Yvelines (2017).
Her research examines the history of legal and organisational structures of finance. In her Phd, she focused on the Trust, the legal device used by US pension funds and showed how finance has appropriated his protection heritage. In that respect, Fiduciary capitalism does not mark the advent of a new compromise between wage-earners and capital but rather, a renewed form of the seizure of fiduciary power by institutional investors and a new stage in the history of capitalism.
After the thesis, she undertook advisory work for government institutions about investment policies of european long-term investors and the financing of ecological transition.
Her HDR comes back to the US financial history and examines how the financial professionals who claimed to be serving their clients’ interests and the political representatives who encouraged asset management expansion, since World War 2, have justified the change of investment norms and channelled the American economy towards an economic order that has today proven itself to be hostile to the middle classes.