Two dominant frames treat financial wealth as either real value or pure illusion

Evidence

In the first chapter, I note that it is all too easy to slip into one of two undialectical approaches to finance and financialization. One position, often, but not exclusively, associated with a neoclassical approach, would insist that financial wealth is just as real as any other form of value, determined as it is by the eternal and infallible laws of supply and demand. If there is a real demand for credit default swaps, then their value is as real as the value of rice, oil or pickled herring. Such positions tend to reinforce the idea that the financial sector is merely the logical evolution of money: a neutral expedient to facilitate the primordial act of exchange. Typically (though not exclusively), those who hold this opinion blame the financial sector’s failures not on the pathology of markets, but on bungled government regulations, subsidies and interventions that skew the market’s inherent ability to properly value real and financial assets alike. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 41

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sets up the two poles the book refuses — neoclassical realism and speculation-as-illusion — establishing the definitional terrain.
• XREF: connects to: Asset value derives from future earnings rather than intrinsic commodity value — Kean Birch, Rethinking Value in the Bio-economy:…, 73; Financialised valuations override prior forms of valuation and reshape how people act and identify — Ève Chiapello, Financialisation of Valuation, 16; Financial assets are largely imaginary, yet imaginary does not mean unreal — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 29 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Money carries multiple frames of value beyond its economic function #expands (0.82) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 386
• Ownership of wealth is real only when one can part with it freely #qualifies (0.80) — , A Year of World Stories, 12081
• Markets generate wealth through disposable metaphors, not coherent narratives #complicates (0.78) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 136
• Financial theories can become true by guiding the practices they describe #expands (0.75) — Gerald F. Davis & Suntae Kim, Financialization of the Economy, 38