Finance creates intangible commodities that exist only through valuation techniques

Evidence

National economic difficulties are preventing States from making the necessary social, cultural, and environmental investments themselves, but they can dedicate public resources to organising incentives to attract private investors and extend their action. In fact they are actively encouraged to do so by new actors who propose to use the mechanisms of finance to do good, and are also on the lookout for new asset classes to expand their activities. This deepening of financialisation may be connected to capitalism’s need to commodify and marketize more and more activities in order to grow and expand its field of operations. What is striking here is that this process of commodification uses the language of finance. The markets that are created are all dependent on investment markets. The commodities that are created are financial assets related to new intangible commodities such as ecosystem services or social impacts and these intangible products exist purely because of the financialised valuation techniques that brought them into being. — Ève Chiapello, Financialisation of Valuation, 104

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies how financialization-as-commodification works: intangible commodities are brought into being by the valuation techniques themselves.
• XREF: Connects to the reading purpose on financialized valuation colonizing non-financial activity, and to theoretical accounts of performativity of economics (Callon, MacKenzie). — connects to: Value is not inherent in things but achieved through capitalization practices. — Kean Birch, Rethinking Value in the Bio-economy:…, 28; Financialisation also colonizes non-economic spheres via valuation techniques. — Ève Chiapello, Financialisation of Valuation, 15; Financialised valuations override prior forms of valuation and reshape how people act and identify — Ève Chiapello, Financialisation of Valuation, 16 (+7 more)

Related

• Financialisation also colonizes non-economic spheres via valuation techniques. (similarity 0.89)
• Finance derives prices for new objects from unrelated market prices (similarity 0.84)
• Financialization is how society gets liquidated into marketable commodities (similarity 0.83)
• Financialised valuations override prior forms of valuation and reshape how people act and identify (similarity 0.83)
• Financialised valuation draws on financial economics and mathematical finance. (similarity 0.83)
• Finance creatively generates new forms of social and political life (similarity 0.81)
• Financial language now reshapes public policy domains historically governed by other values. (similarity 0.80)
• Financialized valuation imposes short-termism and disconnects decisions from material production. (similarity 0.80)
• Financial fictions uniquely harness human imagination and creativity compared to other social fictions (similarity 0.80)
• Financialization colonizes culture by fusing economic price with social value (similarity 0.80)
• Financialization lets capital extract value from social life without destroying its creative source ecosystems (similarity 0.80)
• Value in the bio-economy is produced through valuation practices, not intrinsic to biological matter. (similarity 0.80)
• Financialised reasoning can colonise non-monetary measures like scores and percentages. (similarity 0.79)
• Financialization means finance’s logics penetrate the fabric of everyday life (similarity 0.79)
• Financialization makes belief in value more central than ever (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Financial models construct the markets they purport only to describe. #expands (0.85) — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 120
• Financialization is how society gets liquidated into marketable commodities #expands (0.75) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 566
• Finance produces its own imagined communities rather than merely colonizing existing ones #expands (0.72)