On the road again

“In order to grasp today’s capitalism we need financial analysis, but the phenomenon of financialization sucks oxygen from the atmosphere. It privatizes information that should be public, just as it commercializes everyday life and promotes a pattern of ‘uncreative destruction’ in which enterprises and work teams are continually broken up and re-assembled to take advantage of transient arbitrage gains. In addition to helping financial institutions game their own customers, the techniques of financialization allow big capital—large corporations and wealthy individuals—to escape tax and skim the holdings of small shareholders. Note that most pension funds and charitable endowments, but not US mutual funds, are limited by fiduciary rules from much exposure to hedge funds or exotic derivatives. A further corollary of proliferating financialization is that the regulations governing credit creation were first loosened and then almost entirely ignored. Reckless credit expansion has long been the primrose path to financial crisis and collapse.” – Robin Blackburn, “The Subprime Crisis”