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Financialization and its discontents

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Perry Mehrling
Perry Mehrling*
Affiliation:
Barnard College, USA
*
Corresponding author: Perry Mehrling, Barnard College, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027, USA. Email: pmehrling@barnard.edu
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Abstract

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Finance is not something separate from society. It is neither a Marxian superstructure nor a monetarist veil, but rather the very substance of modern social relations, a web of time-dated promises to pay that stretches from now into the future, and from here around the globe. Financial relationships are not about mediating something else on the ‘real’ side of the economy; they are the constitutive relationships of the whole system. Financial globalization and global financialization have produced a global Financial Society, hierarchical and inherently unstable. The problem confronting social analysts is not so much to find the social in the money grid - the money grid is already social - but rather to understand the dynamical operations of that grid on its own terms. This essay sketches the fundamental processes that produce and reproduce Financial Society - settlement and market-making - as an attempt to provide a realistic point of departure for any feasible project of reform.

Keywords

FinancializationPolanyiMinskysurvival constraintmarket theory of money
Type
Keynote essay
Information
Finance and Society , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , 2017 , pp. 1 - 10
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2017

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