Finance lets capital attempt many commodification strategies while interest covers most failures

Evidence

Second, finance allows long-term profiteering by offering capitalists credit, to pursue projects that may take years to come to profitable fruition. For instance, while ultimately extremely profitable, the construction of a mine, or the development of new communication or industrial technologies, takes time and does not afford returns quickly enough to entice most capitalist investors. Finance allows the capitalist class as a whole to advance money to individual capitalists whose ventures will, eventually, benefit the system as a whole and commodify another aspect of the world or of social relations (in terms of new resource “inputs” derived from the mine, or new technologies of exploitation). Through the magic of interest, lending institutions and individual investors can afford to provide many more capitalists with funds than will ever succeed: the interest (at least theoretically) covers the costs of the failure of some enterprises and provides an incentive for investment. Hence, finance allows a much more dynamic capitalist economy and encourages the expansion of capitalist accumulation into new spheres of social life as “entrepreneurs” seek to commodify ever-more dimensions of human existence. For instance, the frantic (and ultimately successful) rush to commodify the internet was facilitated by the rise of the so-called dot.com bubble, which saw financial markets make speculative investments in a multitude of tiny, fly-by-night firms with “good ideas” (Marazzi 2010). While most of these ideas would never actually generate meaningful revenue, the sphere of finance afforded the possibility for capital to attempt tens of thousands of strategies of commodification, knowing full well that only a handful (Amazon, Yahoo, etc.) would succeed, but that this success would make up for the capital invested in the legions of failures. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 493

Categorization

• XREF: Directly scaffolds deWaard’s cultural argument: finance’s spread into everyday life is driven by this broad-spectrum speculative mechanism, not just by greed. — connects to: Finance is an essential fix for capital’s overproduction tendency, not mere elite skulduggery — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 101; Finance funds commodification experiments where only a few ventures succeed — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 457