Natascha van der Zwan — Making Sense of Financialization

27 published claims from this book.

• Capital-account liberalization creates surplus-deficit imbalances and boom-bust cycles
• Financial discourses do not dominate ordinary people’s saving behavior.
• Financial fragility plus stagnant wages produce debt-driven growth regimes prone to crisis
• Financial practice expresses class and acts as a control mechanism
• Financialization both derives profits from finance and drains capital from productive investment
• Financialization involves new forms of state intervention, not state retreat.
• Financialization is a political project tied to US hegemony, not a market efficiency outcome.
• Financialization operates as decentralized power through everyday financial practices
• Financialization redraws who supplies life’s basic needs, shifting welfare from state to markets
• Financialization research has spread across disciplines, regions, and mainstream journals.
• Financialization scholarship assumes it is a universal, uniform process
• Financialization scholarship spans three approaches with distinct analytic foci.
• Financialization theory links wage-compromise collapse and shareholder value to inequality
• Foreign investor ownership rises even in concentrated-ownership economies
• Funded pensions create cross-class alliances between workers and owners
• German firms deployed shareholder-value rhetoric symbolically without full implementation
• Globalization and financialization form one mutually reinforcing process, not rival frameworks
• Post-2008 US financial reform contained excess but did not restructure the system.
• Shareholder value operates as discourse disconnected from actual firm performance
• Shareholder value policies spread unevenly, aided by institutional preconditions and safety-in-numbers timing
• Shareholder-value incentive pay enriched managers more than shareholders themselves
• Socially responsible investing cannot fully escape the financialized regime.
• The 2008 crisis failed to produce a paradigmatic shift comparable to the New Deal.
• The 2008 subprime crisis confirmed central predictions of financialization studies.
• The state actively drives financialization through policy, while individuals internalize its risk discourses.
• Wage-earners are both workers and capital owners under financialization
• Whether financialization causes neoliberalism or the reverse remains disputed.