Financialization extracts profit for investors while creating precarity for workers

Evidence

The consequences of financial hegemony are myriad: the imposition of managerial mandates to create shareholder value, the rise in income paid to financial ­managers, the stripping of assets for short-term profit, the reduction of returns to labor, the attrition of the welfare state, and the foreclosure of a politics that lies outside of market-based solutions. “Perhaps the most terrifying feature of ­financialization,” Max Haiven suggests, “is that there is no one steering the ship; there is no grand conspiracy.” Financialization represents an unaccountable system of global economic organization, a byzantine flow of transactions that has usurped democratic control. It is difficult to conceptualize such broad macroeconomic cause and effect because the finance industry keeps a low profile and intentionally uses opaque language to discourage understanding by those other than its practitioners. But it is important to reckon with the more immediate, local, and personal elements of finance, especially its cultural effects. In its many ­different guises, whether asset management or private equity or hedge funds or venture capital or derivatives, the recurring theme of financialization is an extractive ­process that generates profit for wealthy investors and precarity for workers. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 172

Categorization

• DEFINE: Hammers down the working definition of financialization: an extractive process operating across asset management, private equity, hedges, venture capital, and derivatives.
• XREF: connects to: Entrepreneurial labor shifts financial risk onto individual workers — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 143; Financialization functions as a disciplinary mechanism to exploit labor and displace capitalist contradictions — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 58