Finance has become the primary arbiter of policy and value across daily life
Evidence
We live in an age when student loans, mortgages (prime or subprime), consumer debt, credit cards and concerns about retirement investments (should we be fortunate enough to have them) preoccupy daily life and shape economic realities as never before. It is an age when, for all intents and purposes, debts and deficits have become the key and most important arbiters of policy, not only at the level of nation-states but at the level of sub-state actors, including cities, public transportation firms, school boards, universities, hospitals and more. It is an age when financial markets essentially dictate corporate strategy, with the major firms that command the global economy beholden to the anonymous superego of “the shareholders” and their ruthless representatives (fund managers, bank executives, etc.). It is an age when the vast majority of the world’s most basic materials (oil, corn, wheat, rice, lumber, water) are traded dozens, perhaps scores, of times before they are ever consumed, thanks to the frenetic speculative trade in “commodities” futures and derivatives contracts; an age when the value of money has little to do with the economic vitality of the issuing nation but is, rather, determined by the vicissitudes of transnational currency exchanges. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 32
Categorization
- DEFINE: Opens the book’s core diagnosis: financialization as the subordination of social and policy life to debts, deficits, and shareholder dictates.
- XREF: Feeds directly into deWaard’s cultural argument about finance colonizing everyday imagination and infrastructure — the reader’s stated purpose. — connects to: Financialization means finance’s logics penetrate the fabric of everyday life — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 72; Finance has come to dominate American economic life. — Greta R. Krippner, The Financialization of the American…, 7; Finance becomes the model for society’s responses to uncertainty. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 80 (+7 more)
Broader Connections
- Financialization means finance’s logics penetrate the fabric of everyday life
#corroborates(0.93) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 72 - Financialization describes finance’s growing penetration into every domain of life
#corroborates(0.90) — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 97 - Finance becomes the model for society’s responses to uncertainty.
#expands(0.85) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 80 - Finance vocabulary now shapes how people imagine and act on the future generally
#expands(0.82) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 20 - Financialization operates as decentralized power through everyday financial practices
#expands(0.80) — Natascha van der Zwan, Making Sense of Financialization, 20 - Finance and everyday social life are converging through speculative technologies
#expands(0.80) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 327 - Opacity of financial instruments extends into social and political life.
#expands(0.78) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 60 - Viewing everyday life as investment transforms how people act and cooperate.
#expands(0.74) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 61 - Finance has come to dominate American economic life.
#complicates(0.72) — Greta R. Krippner, The Financialization of the American…, 7 - Citizens and governments alike borrowed heavily, embedding finance in everyday life.
#exemplifies(0.71) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 150