text: Hence the extraordinary growth of a class, or rather, of a stratum of rentiers, i.e., people who live by 'clipping coupons' [in the sense of collecting interest payments on bonds], who take no part in any enterprise whatever, whose profession is idleness. The export of capital, one of the most essential economic bases of imperialism, still more completely isolates the rentiers from production and sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country that lives by exploiting the labour of several overseas countries and colonies.
  Current usage
  Current usage of the term 'rentier capitalism' describes the gaining of 'rentier' income from ownership or control of assets that generate economic rents rather than from capital or labour used for production in a free competitive market. The term rentier state is mainly used not in its original meaning, as an imperialistic state thriving on labor of other countries and colonies, but as a state which derives all or a substantial portion of its national revenues from the rent of indigenous resources to external clients.
  Guy Standing has claimed rentier capitalism has become predominant in capitalistic economies since the 1980s. Brett Christophers of Uppsala University, Sweden has asserted that rentier capitalism has been the foundation of the United Kingdom's economic policy from the 1970s onwards. With the return of high inflation to the United Kingdom in 2022, political economist William Davies surveys recent British economic events in light of rentier capitalism.