Financialization operates without a central steering agent despite lesser conspiracies.

Evidence

Perhaps the most terrifying feature of financialization is that there is no one steering the ship; there is no grand conspiracy, though its operations do depend on lesser conspiracies. Rather, I want to understand financialization as a means by which social agency (at both the highest echelons of the financial world and the lowest depths of the sub-prime) is transformed and reoriented towards the reproduction of a pathological and cancerous system. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 38

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The ‘no one steering the ship’ claim resonates with the reader’s prior work on self-reproducing systems without intentional control, echoing Milgrom’s and the noise/silence books’ decentralized dynamics.
• QUESTION: What exactly does it mean for capital to reproduce itself ‘pathologically’ absent a steering agent — what are the concrete mechanisms that serve as the ship’s rudder if no one holds it?

Related

• Financialization operates without centralized direction yet reproduces itself through transformed agency (similarity 0.92)
• Solutions to financialization require abolishing capitalism, not just re-regulating finance (similarity 0.79)
• The shift to finance capitalism is nonlinear, not a clean rupture (similarity 0.79)