Financialization creates a bifurcated hierarchy between celebrated risk-takers and racialized at-risk victims

Evidence

In Chapter 2, I take up the theme of precariousness, a term that has emerged among scholars and activists over the last 20 years to describe the new timbre of work and life in a highly financialized age when life’s risks have been dramatically privatized and downloaded from governments and corporations onto individuals and everyday life. I argue that precariousness is not incidental to financialization; they are deeply and structurally linked, and, indeed, financialization helps create a stark and troubling bifurcation and hierarchy of precarity. At its top, I explore the example of the quintessential icon of the Wall Street financier, the lauded “risk-taker,” whose personal and professional embrace of precariousness as an inherent good makes him or her an extremely effective agent of the broader process of financialization. At the bottom, I explore the plight of the abject “at risk” victim (or, for some, villain) of the recent economic meltdown: the (racialized) sub-prime borrower, whose “toxic” debts poisoned the financial system in 2007. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 45

Categorization

• XREF: The risk-taker vs. at-risk borrower contrast is the same precarity bifurcation central to deWaard’s account of how finance seduces and abandons cultural workers. — connects to: Financialized risk-taking is concentrated in the upper middle class, not spread across all earners — Neil Fligstein & Adam Goldstein, The Emergence of a Finance Culture in…, 143; Predatory sub-prime lending preyed on America’s poor and racialized communities — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 154; Households signal financialization through risk-taking, relaxed debt attitudes, and speculative strategies — Neil Fligstein & Adam Goldstein, The Emergence of a Finance Culture in…, 48 (+9 more)
• SEED: Angle: how the cultural celebration of the Wall Street risk-taker as a moral hero reframes irresponsibility as virtue — the risk-taker as the finance economy’s folk hero.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: is the ‘risk-taker as hero’ framing visibly present in film and literature, and does that cultural glorification itself accelerate financialization?

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism induces risk-bearing then blames the victims when risk fails #responds-to (0.90) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 351
• Black families have inherited psychological stress where white families inherited wealth #exemplifies (0.85) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 911
• Derivatives mask the social violence of financialization as neutral risk calculation #expands (0.82) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 277
• Inheritance transfers from past state-sanctioned violence drive today’s racial wealth gap #corroborates (0.80) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 910
• Financialization replaced welfare-state collective security with individualized speculative insurance #expands (0.80) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 92
• Households signal financialization through risk-taking, relaxed debt attitudes, and speculative strategies #expands (0.78) — Neil Fligstein & Adam Goldstein, The Emergence of a Finance Culture in…, 48
• Intergenerational wealth transfers compound the racial wealth gap through the cycle of tax-subsidized assets #corroborates (0.78) — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 504
• Financialization establishes ideological dominance of individual profit over collective interests #complicates (0.72) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 109