Financiers justify even predatory practices by invoking innovation and creativity

Evidence

This romantic narrative of what finance accomplishes emerges as perhaps the single most powerful rationale for the financial sector both within and beyond its quarters. Ho (2009, 67–72) reports that, when investment bankers are not simply justifying their actions as the natural expression of biological human competitive individualism, they measure the social good of their work in its capacity to foster creativity, innovation and dynamism within the economy at large. Even when financiers are engaged in what would appear to be entirely destructive and predatory pursuits (like private equity firms that strip bankrupt companies of assets and worker protections, then “flip” them on the market; currency speculators who play havoc with national economies; or sub-prime securities traders who benefit from endemic poverty), they make recourse to this narrative that justifies financial accumulation in the name of a broader economic creativity. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 427

Categorization

• XREF: Links directly to deWaard’s cultural argument about finance’s discursive self-legitimation, and echoes the ideology-critique of finance as ‘creative’ that the reader’s stated goal prioritizes.
• SEED: Angles toward ‘creativity’ as finance’s master alibi — a genealogy of how creative-economy discourse laundered financial predation.