#financialization — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #financialization, aggregated by home.social.
-
"Governments and their central banks may pretend to be lowering interest rates to spur the economy, but the basic reason is to re-inflate prices for financial securities and real estate.
That’s the main aim of today’s finance capitalism, after all. Its aim of increasing fortunes by creating debt-leveraged asset-price gains has turned economies into a great Ponzi scheme.
This policy must fail because preventing prices for collateral held by banks and other creditors from falling in price, and thus causing a loss of financialized asset-price gains, requires the economy to take on more and more debt.
(...)
[A] Ponzi scheme has to be kept going because you need new entrants into the scheme. There is no real underlying value there. There is nothing actually generating wealth. Instead, there is a pretense, a claim that the scheme is making money, and very high dividends and capital gains are paid out to investors as if substantial profits are being earned.But where does the money come from to pay these investors if there is no real generation of profits? The answer is that the promoters keep hyping the Ponzi scheme and hope that new investors will continue to join. As P.T. Barnum supposedly said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” The scheme depends on attracting more and more participants, whose contributions are then used to pay the high dividends promised to the earlier investors.
This process can continue for a while, but eventually the nominal debts owed to depositors or participants become so large that new investors are no longer bringing in enough money to sustain the payouts. At that point, the entire scheme collapses.
The economy today resembles that kind of structure. The real estate sector, the banking sector, and stock market companies have all borrowed heavily just to pay the interest obligations that are coming due."
https://braveneweurope.com/michael-hudson-lena-petrova-why-this-is-not-the-1970s-again
#Capitalism #Financialization #CasinoCapitalism #PonziScheme #Debt
-
"Governments and their central banks may pretend to be lowering interest rates to spur the economy, but the basic reason is to re-inflate prices for financial securities and real estate.
That’s the main aim of today’s finance capitalism, after all. Its aim of increasing fortunes by creating debt-leveraged asset-price gains has turned economies into a great Ponzi scheme.
This policy must fail because preventing prices for collateral held by banks and other creditors from falling in price, and thus causing a loss of financialized asset-price gains, requires the economy to take on more and more debt.
(...)
[A] Ponzi scheme has to be kept going because you need new entrants into the scheme. There is no real underlying value there. There is nothing actually generating wealth. Instead, there is a pretense, a claim that the scheme is making money, and very high dividends and capital gains are paid out to investors as if substantial profits are being earned.But where does the money come from to pay these investors if there is no real generation of profits? The answer is that the promoters keep hyping the Ponzi scheme and hope that new investors will continue to join. As P.T. Barnum supposedly said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” The scheme depends on attracting more and more participants, whose contributions are then used to pay the high dividends promised to the earlier investors.
This process can continue for a while, but eventually the nominal debts owed to depositors or participants become so large that new investors are no longer bringing in enough money to sustain the payouts. At that point, the entire scheme collapses.
The economy today resembles that kind of structure. The real estate sector, the banking sector, and stock market companies have all borrowed heavily just to pay the interest obligations that are coming due."
https://braveneweurope.com/michael-hudson-lena-petrova-why-this-is-not-the-1970s-again
#Capitalism #Financialization #CasinoCapitalism #PonziScheme #Debt
-
"Governments and their central banks may pretend to be lowering interest rates to spur the economy, but the basic reason is to re-inflate prices for financial securities and real estate.
That’s the main aim of today’s finance capitalism, after all. Its aim of increasing fortunes by creating debt-leveraged asset-price gains has turned economies into a great Ponzi scheme.
This policy must fail because preventing prices for collateral held by banks and other creditors from falling in price, and thus causing a loss of financialized asset-price gains, requires the economy to take on more and more debt.
(...)
[A] Ponzi scheme has to be kept going because you need new entrants into the scheme. There is no real underlying value there. There is nothing actually generating wealth. Instead, there is a pretense, a claim that the scheme is making money, and very high dividends and capital gains are paid out to investors as if substantial profits are being earned.But where does the money come from to pay these investors if there is no real generation of profits? The answer is that the promoters keep hyping the Ponzi scheme and hope that new investors will continue to join. As P.T. Barnum supposedly said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” The scheme depends on attracting more and more participants, whose contributions are then used to pay the high dividends promised to the earlier investors.
This process can continue for a while, but eventually the nominal debts owed to depositors or participants become so large that new investors are no longer bringing in enough money to sustain the payouts. At that point, the entire scheme collapses.
The economy today resembles that kind of structure. The real estate sector, the banking sector, and stock market companies have all borrowed heavily just to pay the interest obligations that are coming due."
https://braveneweurope.com/michael-hudson-lena-petrova-why-this-is-not-the-1970s-again
#Capitalism #Financialization #CasinoCapitalism #PonziScheme #Debt
-
"Governments and their central banks may pretend to be lowering interest rates to spur the economy, but the basic reason is to re-inflate prices for financial securities and real estate.
That’s the main aim of today’s finance capitalism, after all. Its aim of increasing fortunes by creating debt-leveraged asset-price gains has turned economies into a great Ponzi scheme.
This policy must fail because preventing prices for collateral held by banks and other creditors from falling in price, and thus causing a loss of financialized asset-price gains, requires the economy to take on more and more debt.
(...)
[A] Ponzi scheme has to be kept going because you need new entrants into the scheme. There is no real underlying value there. There is nothing actually generating wealth. Instead, there is a pretense, a claim that the scheme is making money, and very high dividends and capital gains are paid out to investors as if substantial profits are being earned.But where does the money come from to pay these investors if there is no real generation of profits? The answer is that the promoters keep hyping the Ponzi scheme and hope that new investors will continue to join. As P.T. Barnum supposedly said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” The scheme depends on attracting more and more participants, whose contributions are then used to pay the high dividends promised to the earlier investors.
This process can continue for a while, but eventually the nominal debts owed to depositors or participants become so large that new investors are no longer bringing in enough money to sustain the payouts. At that point, the entire scheme collapses.
The economy today resembles that kind of structure. The real estate sector, the banking sector, and stock market companies have all borrowed heavily just to pay the interest obligations that are coming due."
https://braveneweurope.com/michael-hudson-lena-petrova-why-this-is-not-the-1970s-again
#Capitalism #Financialization #CasinoCapitalism #PonziScheme #Debt
-
"Governments and their central banks may pretend to be lowering interest rates to spur the economy, but the basic reason is to re-inflate prices for financial securities and real estate.
That’s the main aim of today’s finance capitalism, after all. Its aim of increasing fortunes by creating debt-leveraged asset-price gains has turned economies into a great Ponzi scheme.
This policy must fail because preventing prices for collateral held by banks and other creditors from falling in price, and thus causing a loss of financialized asset-price gains, requires the economy to take on more and more debt.
(...)
[A] Ponzi scheme has to be kept going because you need new entrants into the scheme. There is no real underlying value there. There is nothing actually generating wealth. Instead, there is a pretense, a claim that the scheme is making money, and very high dividends and capital gains are paid out to investors as if substantial profits are being earned.But where does the money come from to pay these investors if there is no real generation of profits? The answer is that the promoters keep hyping the Ponzi scheme and hope that new investors will continue to join. As P.T. Barnum supposedly said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” The scheme depends on attracting more and more participants, whose contributions are then used to pay the high dividends promised to the earlier investors.
This process can continue for a while, but eventually the nominal debts owed to depositors or participants become so large that new investors are no longer bringing in enough money to sustain the payouts. At that point, the entire scheme collapses.
The economy today resembles that kind of structure. The real estate sector, the banking sector, and stock market companies have all borrowed heavily just to pay the interest obligations that are coming due."
https://braveneweurope.com/michael-hudson-lena-petrova-why-this-is-not-the-1970s-again
#Capitalism #Financialization #CasinoCapitalism #PonziScheme #Debt
-
🧋BlackRock CEO Larry Fink disagrees with everyone who says there is AI bubble
｢ He added that global demand for computing power has reached a point where financial markets could eventually develop instruments tied to it.“A new asset class will be buying futures of compute,” Fink predicted, highlighting how access to computing resources may become a tradable commodity. “We just don’t have enough compute power right now,” he added ｣
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/blackrock-ceo-larry-fink-disagrees-with-everyone-who-says-there-is-ai-bubble-says-its-actually-the-opposite-as-we-have-severe-shortage-of-/articleshow/130998956.cms -
The Final Straw Radio Podcast | A weekly Anarchist Radio Show & Podcast [Unofficial] @[email protected] ·Vicky Osterweil on Disney, Intellectual Property and Storytelling
-
The Final Straw Radio Podcast | A weekly Anarchist Radio Show & Podcast [Unofficial] @[email protected] ·Vicky Osterweil on Disney, Intellectual Property and Storytelling
-
The Final Straw Radio Podcast | A weekly Anarchist Radio Show & Podcast [Unofficial] @[email protected] ·Vicky Osterweil on Disney, Intellectual Property and Storytelling
-
The Final Straw Radio Podcast | A weekly Anarchist Radio Show & Podcast [Unofficial] @[email protected] ·Vicky Osterweil on Disney, Intellectual Property and Storytelling
-
The Final Straw Radio Podcast | A weekly Anarchist Radio Show & Podcast [Unofficial] @[email protected] ·Vicky Osterweil on Disney, Intellectual Property and Storytelling
-
"I begin with the view that, and I put it very crudely, in Britain we have to learn to grow our own green beans. In Britain, we expect to have fresh green beans on our tables every day of the year, and we expect to draw down Kenya’s water table and exploit its cheap labor so that we can have green beans every day of the year. That has to end. We’ve got to learn to grow our own green beans. We can’t prey upon the assets of others for our own economic well-being.
At the same time, I want to be very clear, I am not a nationalist. I believe it must be possible for a government to respond to its electorate and act in their interests. For me, that’s democracy. At the same time, I don’t believe we can achieve that degree of autonomy without internationalism. We can only do it by actually cooperating. I’m arguing that there must be a much greater emphasis on environmental self-sufficiency. However, that is not nationalism, that is internationalism in my view. That is saying that we want to cooperate with our friends and partners across the world. We don’t want to exploit and extract assets from them. It’s as simple as that.
What always strikes me about the great financial crisis of 2007–9 was that the Left didn’t know it was coming (...) People talked about globalization as if it was a given. And then when it blew up, there was no plan B. We didn’t even know it could happen. We were as stupid as the chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. The Left was as stupid as Greenspan, who said he didn’t believe it could happen.
Meanwhile, Wall Street couldn’t believe its luck because it then consolidated itself and became stronger than it had ever been. Before the financial crisis, it could go bust. Since the financial crisis, no Wall Street bank can go bust anymore."
https://jacobin.com/2026/03/global-financial-system-deindustrialization-climate/
#Deindustrialization #Financialization #ClimateChange #Globalization #Debt #Capitalism
-
"I begin with the view that, and I put it very crudely, in Britain we have to learn to grow our own green beans. In Britain, we expect to have fresh green beans on our tables every day of the year, and we expect to draw down Kenya’s water table and exploit its cheap labor so that we can have green beans every day of the year. That has to end. We’ve got to learn to grow our own green beans. We can’t prey upon the assets of others for our own economic well-being.
At the same time, I want to be very clear, I am not a nationalist. I believe it must be possible for a government to respond to its electorate and act in their interests. For me, that’s democracy. At the same time, I don’t believe we can achieve that degree of autonomy without internationalism. We can only do it by actually cooperating. I’m arguing that there must be a much greater emphasis on environmental self-sufficiency. However, that is not nationalism, that is internationalism in my view. That is saying that we want to cooperate with our friends and partners across the world. We don’t want to exploit and extract assets from them. It’s as simple as that.
What always strikes me about the great financial crisis of 2007–9 was that the Left didn’t know it was coming (...) People talked about globalization as if it was a given. And then when it blew up, there was no plan B. We didn’t even know it could happen. We were as stupid as the chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. The Left was as stupid as Greenspan, who said he didn’t believe it could happen.
Meanwhile, Wall Street couldn’t believe its luck because it then consolidated itself and became stronger than it had ever been. Before the financial crisis, it could go bust. Since the financial crisis, no Wall Street bank can go bust anymore."
https://jacobin.com/2026/03/global-financial-system-deindustrialization-climate/
#Deindustrialization #Financialization #ClimateChange #Globalization #Debt #Capitalism
-
"I begin with the view that, and I put it very crudely, in Britain we have to learn to grow our own green beans. In Britain, we expect to have fresh green beans on our tables every day of the year, and we expect to draw down Kenya’s water table and exploit its cheap labor so that we can have green beans every day of the year. That has to end. We’ve got to learn to grow our own green beans. We can’t prey upon the assets of others for our own economic well-being.
At the same time, I want to be very clear, I am not a nationalist. I believe it must be possible for a government to respond to its electorate and act in their interests. For me, that’s democracy. At the same time, I don’t believe we can achieve that degree of autonomy without internationalism. We can only do it by actually cooperating. I’m arguing that there must be a much greater emphasis on environmental self-sufficiency. However, that is not nationalism, that is internationalism in my view. That is saying that we want to cooperate with our friends and partners across the world. We don’t want to exploit and extract assets from them. It’s as simple as that.
What always strikes me about the great financial crisis of 2007–9 was that the Left didn’t know it was coming (...) People talked about globalization as if it was a given. And then when it blew up, there was no plan B. We didn’t even know it could happen. We were as stupid as the chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. The Left was as stupid as Greenspan, who said he didn’t believe it could happen.
Meanwhile, Wall Street couldn’t believe its luck because it then consolidated itself and became stronger than it had ever been. Before the financial crisis, it could go bust. Since the financial crisis, no Wall Street bank can go bust anymore."
https://jacobin.com/2026/03/global-financial-system-deindustrialization-climate/
#Deindustrialization #Financialization #ClimateChange #Globalization #Debt #Capitalism
-
"I begin with the view that, and I put it very crudely, in Britain we have to learn to grow our own green beans. In Britain, we expect to have fresh green beans on our tables every day of the year, and we expect to draw down Kenya’s water table and exploit its cheap labor so that we can have green beans every day of the year. That has to end. We’ve got to learn to grow our own green beans. We can’t prey upon the assets of others for our own economic well-being.
At the same time, I want to be very clear, I am not a nationalist. I believe it must be possible for a government to respond to its electorate and act in their interests. For me, that’s democracy. At the same time, I don’t believe we can achieve that degree of autonomy without internationalism. We can only do it by actually cooperating. I’m arguing that there must be a much greater emphasis on environmental self-sufficiency. However, that is not nationalism, that is internationalism in my view. That is saying that we want to cooperate with our friends and partners across the world. We don’t want to exploit and extract assets from them. It’s as simple as that.
What always strikes me about the great financial crisis of 2007–9 was that the Left didn’t know it was coming (...) People talked about globalization as if it was a given. And then when it blew up, there was no plan B. We didn’t even know it could happen. We were as stupid as the chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. The Left was as stupid as Greenspan, who said he didn’t believe it could happen.
Meanwhile, Wall Street couldn’t believe its luck because it then consolidated itself and became stronger than it had ever been. Before the financial crisis, it could go bust. Since the financial crisis, no Wall Street bank can go bust anymore."
https://jacobin.com/2026/03/global-financial-system-deindustrialization-climate/
#Deindustrialization #Financialization #ClimateChange #Globalization #Debt #Capitalism
-
"I begin with the view that, and I put it very crudely, in Britain we have to learn to grow our own green beans. In Britain, we expect to have fresh green beans on our tables every day of the year, and we expect to draw down Kenya’s water table and exploit its cheap labor so that we can have green beans every day of the year. That has to end. We’ve got to learn to grow our own green beans. We can’t prey upon the assets of others for our own economic well-being.
At the same time, I want to be very clear, I am not a nationalist. I believe it must be possible for a government to respond to its electorate and act in their interests. For me, that’s democracy. At the same time, I don’t believe we can achieve that degree of autonomy without internationalism. We can only do it by actually cooperating. I’m arguing that there must be a much greater emphasis on environmental self-sufficiency. However, that is not nationalism, that is internationalism in my view. That is saying that we want to cooperate with our friends and partners across the world. We don’t want to exploit and extract assets from them. It’s as simple as that.
What always strikes me about the great financial crisis of 2007–9 was that the Left didn’t know it was coming (...) People talked about globalization as if it was a given. And then when it blew up, there was no plan B. We didn’t even know it could happen. We were as stupid as the chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. The Left was as stupid as Greenspan, who said he didn’t believe it could happen.
Meanwhile, Wall Street couldn’t believe its luck because it then consolidated itself and became stronger than it had ever been. Before the financial crisis, it could go bust. Since the financial crisis, no Wall Street bank can go bust anymore."
https://jacobin.com/2026/03/global-financial-system-deindustrialization-climate/
#Deindustrialization #Financialization #ClimateChange #Globalization #Debt #Capitalism
-
The housing crisis in one graph.
Source: https://www.metabolic.nl/publications/fertile-ground/, full report, p. 22
-
Ein lesenswerter, kritischer Artikel über die Finanzindustrie, u.a. über die Zusammenhänge zwischen der #Financialization der Wirtschaft und stagnierender Produktivität bzw. geringen Infrastruktur-Investitionen:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/opinion/capitalism-industry-financialization.html -
I'll see your "enshittification" and raise you a "financialization."
Topical ribaldry aside, I think financialization is the larger concept that enshittification sits inside, and is the core problem we need to fix, especially in the US.
Say it with me people: CAMPAIGN. FINANCE. REFORM.
Interesting that this was written by an old-school conservative.
Or, if you have NY Times access: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/opinion/capitalism-industry-financialization.html
-
“ #financialization is the least studied and least explored reason behind our inability to create a #sharedprosperity.” open.substack.com/pub/annpetti... #USdollar #MarkCarney
Trump and Bessent Trash the Do... -
🚨 Breaking News: Private equity firms bought 500 autism centers in a decade! Who knew the solution to medical care was a spreadsheet and not, you know, actual care? 📈💉 What's next? Hedge funds managing daycares? 🙄
https://www.brown.edu/news/2026-01-07/private-equity-autism-centers #PrivateEquity #AutismCare #MedicalIndustry #HealthcareNews #Financialization #HackerNews #ngated -
Digesting Food Studies—Episode 112: Centralization of Power in Food Systems
https://rss.com/podcasts/digesting-food-studies/2382014/
There’s a lot of power in food and food systems: care and nurturing, regeneration and resilience. The power to feed, to refuse food, and to transform landscapes. And then there’s petroleum, data, GMOs, and pesticides; financialization, tractors, and land-grabbing…
This episode explores how corporations and governments operate and control spaces of production and transformation, with articles from Vol. 2, No. 2 of CFS, which our guest, Jennifer Clapp, co–guest edited. (https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2)
Alexia Moyer shares learnings from Brian Brett’s book, Trauma Farm, and PhD student Heidi Janes responds to a selection of CFS articles about corporate power.
#DigestingFoodStudies
#FoodSystems
#Agriculture
#Farming
#Pesticides
#Fertilizer
#Tractors
#PrecisionAgriculture
#Financialization
#LandGrabbing
#Palestine
#Gaza
#Power
#Capitalism
#BrianBrett
#TraumaFarm
#Academia
#FoodPodcast
image: Johnson Martin, Pixabay -
📉 COP30: Zimbabwe's forest and energy projects reveal the downside of carbon credits
https://phys.org/news/2025-11-cop30-zimbabwe-forest-energy-reveal.html
#zimbabwe #africa #climatechange #carboncredits #crime #fraud #corruption #financialization
-
"The reality is lenders and private credit funds are not so distinct. The two have entwined their fates, with banks extending hundreds of billions of dollars in financing that boosts private credit funds’ returns.
Regulators, economists and government officials have started to voice concerns.
The IMF last month warned “beneath the calm surface, the ground is shifting”. The European Central Bank has observed that links between banks and private credit are creating channels through which “shocks can be transmitted, amplified and redistributed” across the financial system.
One senior private credit executive put it more bluntly: “The [private credit] model is going to be pushed to extremes.”
“This was the problem in 2008, we got to the end of the possible in the banking system and then we were lifting cushions in the conference rooms in the hope that someone’s coins fell out.”
These are the ties between banks and private credit funds that have fuelled the rise of non-bank financing."https://www.ft.com/content/535b3d0c-429c-4e67-a73d-3513e4e730d8
#Banks #Banking #CreditBoom #Finance #Financialization #PrivateCreditFunds
-
"The reality is lenders and private credit funds are not so distinct. The two have entwined their fates, with banks extending hundreds of billions of dollars in financing that boosts private credit funds’ returns.
Regulators, economists and government officials have started to voice concerns.
The IMF last month warned “beneath the calm surface, the ground is shifting”. The European Central Bank has observed that links between banks and private credit are creating channels through which “shocks can be transmitted, amplified and redistributed” across the financial system.
One senior private credit executive put it more bluntly: “The [private credit] model is going to be pushed to extremes.”
“This was the problem in 2008, we got to the end of the possible in the banking system and then we were lifting cushions in the conference rooms in the hope that someone’s coins fell out.”
These are the ties between banks and private credit funds that have fuelled the rise of non-bank financing."https://www.ft.com/content/535b3d0c-429c-4e67-a73d-3513e4e730d8
#Banks #Banking #CreditBoom #Finance #Financialization #PrivateCreditFunds
-
"The reality is lenders and private credit funds are not so distinct. The two have entwined their fates, with banks extending hundreds of billions of dollars in financing that boosts private credit funds’ returns.
Regulators, economists and government officials have started to voice concerns.
The IMF last month warned “beneath the calm surface, the ground is shifting”. The European Central Bank has observed that links between banks and private credit are creating channels through which “shocks can be transmitted, amplified and redistributed” across the financial system.
One senior private credit executive put it more bluntly: “The [private credit] model is going to be pushed to extremes.”
“This was the problem in 2008, we got to the end of the possible in the banking system and then we were lifting cushions in the conference rooms in the hope that someone’s coins fell out.”
These are the ties between banks and private credit funds that have fuelled the rise of non-bank financing."https://www.ft.com/content/535b3d0c-429c-4e67-a73d-3513e4e730d8
#Banks #Banking #CreditBoom #Finance #Financialization #PrivateCreditFunds
-
"The reality is lenders and private credit funds are not so distinct. The two have entwined their fates, with banks extending hundreds of billions of dollars in financing that boosts private credit funds’ returns.
Regulators, economists and government officials have started to voice concerns.
The IMF last month warned “beneath the calm surface, the ground is shifting”. The European Central Bank has observed that links between banks and private credit are creating channels through which “shocks can be transmitted, amplified and redistributed” across the financial system.
One senior private credit executive put it more bluntly: “The [private credit] model is going to be pushed to extremes.”
“This was the problem in 2008, we got to the end of the possible in the banking system and then we were lifting cushions in the conference rooms in the hope that someone’s coins fell out.”
These are the ties between banks and private credit funds that have fuelled the rise of non-bank financing."https://www.ft.com/content/535b3d0c-429c-4e67-a73d-3513e4e730d8
#Banks #Banking #CreditBoom #Finance #Financialization #PrivateCreditFunds
-
"The reality is lenders and private credit funds are not so distinct. The two have entwined their fates, with banks extending hundreds of billions of dollars in financing that boosts private credit funds’ returns.
Regulators, economists and government officials have started to voice concerns.
The IMF last month warned “beneath the calm surface, the ground is shifting”. The European Central Bank has observed that links between banks and private credit are creating channels through which “shocks can be transmitted, amplified and redistributed” across the financial system.
One senior private credit executive put it more bluntly: “The [private credit] model is going to be pushed to extremes.”
“This was the problem in 2008, we got to the end of the possible in the banking system and then we were lifting cushions in the conference rooms in the hope that someone’s coins fell out.”
These are the ties between banks and private credit funds that have fuelled the rise of non-bank financing."https://www.ft.com/content/535b3d0c-429c-4e67-a73d-3513e4e730d8
#Banks #Banking #CreditBoom #Finance #Financialization #PrivateCreditFunds
-
"Q: India still has ambitions of becoming a global manufacturing hub. Governments have tried to push it for two decades—Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched “Make in India” in 2014. Yet India has failed. It missed both waves of manufacturing diversification out of China; those investments went to South East Asia instead. Why does India repeatedly fail to industrialise?
A: I think, ultimately, that has to do with the political economy. Your business elites do not want serious industrialisation. The business elites are either in the financial sector or, even if they are in the industrial sector, they still have very strong links with financial capital which doesn’t like industrialisation because, for them, the most important thing is the rate of return.
In the short run, if you want to develop a serious industrial base, you need to go through a period when finance is repressed. Because if shareholders keep asking for money [in the form of return on investment], companies would not have the money to invest.
(...)
You need to invest in worker skills, infrastructure, and research and development (R&D). I looked up the latest data on R&D in India, and as a proportion of GDP, it is barely 0.6 per cent, compared to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) average of 3 per cent, and South Korea’s 5.2 per cent.I am afraid that there is no serious attempt to develop manufacturing in India. Yes, earlier India built manufacturing industries, but there was no ambition to join the global economy. And later, [the government and companies] did say that they want to develop manufacturing, but they did not do anything serious because they did not want to forego their short-term interests in order to have a more dynamic, industrially driven economy."
#India #Financialization #Industrialization #PoliticalEconomy
-
I watched a community theatre show last night (which was fantastic). It got me thinking about financialisation, and how it leads the hard right to routinely conflate the economically productive and the financially profitable. As if they're one and the same.
(1/?)
-
#authoritarianism #banking #birthrate #capitalism #civilwar #civilization #climatechange #commercialism #corporatism #consumerism #culture #crime #debt #democracy #education #economics #financialization #finance #governance #housing #health #history #immigration #individualism #intelligence #mafia #macroeconomics #monotheism #money #monopoly #military #media #nationalism #natality #politics #power #psychology #religion #society #sociology #uspol #war #wealth
(4/6)
-
"Private equity firms and other alternative asset managers — including Ares Management Corp., Blackstone Inc., Brookfield Corp. and KKR & Co. — are reshaping the once-staid world of life insurance. Over the past decade, they’ve bought, built or partnered with insurers that sell policies and annuities, collectively commanding hundreds of billions of dollars.
In a previous era, life insurers parked their money in the safest corners of the market — mostly high-grade bonds and big-name stocks. But as Wall Street firms expanded into the business, they adopted bolder strategies to boost profits.
Many are shifting liabilities to offshore affiliates subject to less detailed disclosure requirements than in the US. Insurers and those overseas entities are also pursuing higher returns with more sophisticated and potentially less-liquid investments — such as exotic asset-backed securities and other bets tied to private credit or private equity.
Athene has become a trendsetter in other ways. It invests in deals and products from Apollo’s asset management division. It also taps cheap financing from a government-backed system designed to support home loans, which can be reinvested to amplify returns.
Its profits have set off a stampede of imitators, prompting experts — such as researchers at the Bank for International Settlements — to suggest they may be adding risks to the system.""
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-america-insurance-part-1/
#USA #PrivateEquity #CasinoCapitalism #WallStreet #Financialization #Athene #LifeInsurance #Retirement
-
"This paper employs the concept of “enshittification”—the systematic degradation of a service or product in the pursuit of profit—as a powerful metaphor to analyze the decay of the US labor market in the postwar era. Situating this process within Hyman Minsky’s theory of capitalist development, it argues that the current phase of money manager capitalism has accelerated a pervasive “bait-and-switch” dynamic that has emerged since the 1970s. The “bait” was the postwar social contract, which promised but never guaranteed economic security through tight full employment and access to good jobs for all. The “switch” was the neoliberal policy shift that dismantled labor protections, weaponized unemployment (via the NAIRU doctrine), and fostered financialization, leading to stagnant wages, precarity, and household indebtedness. The “trap” is the worker’s inescapable dependency for survival on a job within a system that uses the threat of unemployment as a policy tool. The paper identifies the erosion of four key forces—competition, regulation, interoperability, and worker power, all of which held the tenuous postwar contract together—as the drivers of this enshittification. It concludes by articulating how the federal job guarantee proposal can act as a systemic circuit breaker capable of reverse reengineering the labor market. The job guarantee is not only an alternative to precarious employment and the NAIRU policy framework, but also a comprehensive de facto regulator that introduces much needed competition for labor by firms in the economy. The paper evaluates how the program can introduce countervailing forces to arrest the degradation of the labor market and establish a new standard for good jobs, thereby laying the foundation for a renewed social contract."
#Enshittification #Financialization #Economy #JobGuarantee #Capitalism #Unemployment #Neoliberalism
-
"This paper employs the concept of “enshittification”—the systematic degradation of a service or product in the pursuit of profit—as a powerful metaphor to analyze the decay of the US labor market in the postwar era. Situating this process within Hyman Minsky’s theory of capitalist development, it argues that the current phase of money manager capitalism has accelerated a pervasive “bait-and-switch” dynamic that has emerged since the 1970s. The “bait” was the postwar social contract, which promised but never guaranteed economic security through tight full employment and access to good jobs for all. The “switch” was the neoliberal policy shift that dismantled labor protections, weaponized unemployment (via the NAIRU doctrine), and fostered financialization, leading to stagnant wages, precarity, and household indebtedness. The “trap” is the worker’s inescapable dependency for survival on a job within a system that uses the threat of unemployment as a policy tool. The paper identifies the erosion of four key forces—competition, regulation, interoperability, and worker power, all of which held the tenuous postwar contract together—as the drivers of this enshittification. It concludes by articulating how the federal job guarantee proposal can act as a systemic circuit breaker capable of reverse reengineering the labor market. The job guarantee is not only an alternative to precarious employment and the NAIRU policy framework, but also a comprehensive de facto regulator that introduces much needed competition for labor by firms in the economy. The paper evaluates how the program can introduce countervailing forces to arrest the degradation of the labor market and establish a new standard for good jobs, thereby laying the foundation for a renewed social contract."
#Enshittification #Financialization #Economy #JobGuarantee #Capitalism #Unemployment #Neoliberalism
-
"This paper employs the concept of “enshittification”—the systematic degradation of a service or product in the pursuit of profit—as a powerful metaphor to analyze the decay of the US labor market in the postwar era. Situating this process within Hyman Minsky’s theory of capitalist development, it argues that the current phase of money manager capitalism has accelerated a pervasive “bait-and-switch” dynamic that has emerged since the 1970s. The “bait” was the postwar social contract, which promised but never guaranteed economic security through tight full employment and access to good jobs for all. The “switch” was the neoliberal policy shift that dismantled labor protections, weaponized unemployment (via the NAIRU doctrine), and fostered financialization, leading to stagnant wages, precarity, and household indebtedness. The “trap” is the worker’s inescapable dependency for survival on a job within a system that uses the threat of unemployment as a policy tool. The paper identifies the erosion of four key forces—competition, regulation, interoperability, and worker power, all of which held the tenuous postwar contract together—as the drivers of this enshittification. It concludes by articulating how the federal job guarantee proposal can act as a systemic circuit breaker capable of reverse reengineering the labor market. The job guarantee is not only an alternative to precarious employment and the NAIRU policy framework, but also a comprehensive de facto regulator that introduces much needed competition for labor by firms in the economy. The paper evaluates how the program can introduce countervailing forces to arrest the degradation of the labor market and establish a new standard for good jobs, thereby laying the foundation for a renewed social contract."
#Enshittification #Financialization #Economy #JobGuarantee #Capitalism #Unemployment #Neoliberalism
-
"This paper employs the concept of “enshittification”—the systematic degradation of a service or product in the pursuit of profit—as a powerful metaphor to analyze the decay of the US labor market in the postwar era. Situating this process within Hyman Minsky’s theory of capitalist development, it argues that the current phase of money manager capitalism has accelerated a pervasive “bait-and-switch” dynamic that has emerged since the 1970s. The “bait” was the postwar social contract, which promised but never guaranteed economic security through tight full employment and access to good jobs for all. The “switch” was the neoliberal policy shift that dismantled labor protections, weaponized unemployment (via the NAIRU doctrine), and fostered financialization, leading to stagnant wages, precarity, and household indebtedness. The “trap” is the worker’s inescapable dependency for survival on a job within a system that uses the threat of unemployment as a policy tool. The paper identifies the erosion of four key forces—competition, regulation, interoperability, and worker power, all of which held the tenuous postwar contract together—as the drivers of this enshittification. It concludes by articulating how the federal job guarantee proposal can act as a systemic circuit breaker capable of reverse reengineering the labor market. The job guarantee is not only an alternative to precarious employment and the NAIRU policy framework, but also a comprehensive de facto regulator that introduces much needed competition for labor by firms in the economy. The paper evaluates how the program can introduce countervailing forces to arrest the degradation of the labor market and establish a new standard for good jobs, thereby laying the foundation for a renewed social contract."
#Enshittification #Financialization #Economy #JobGuarantee #Capitalism #Unemployment #Neoliberalism
-
"This paper employs the concept of “enshittification”—the systematic degradation of a service or product in the pursuit of profit—as a powerful metaphor to analyze the decay of the US labor market in the postwar era. Situating this process within Hyman Minsky’s theory of capitalist development, it argues that the current phase of money manager capitalism has accelerated a pervasive “bait-and-switch” dynamic that has emerged since the 1970s. The “bait” was the postwar social contract, which promised but never guaranteed economic security through tight full employment and access to good jobs for all. The “switch” was the neoliberal policy shift that dismantled labor protections, weaponized unemployment (via the NAIRU doctrine), and fostered financialization, leading to stagnant wages, precarity, and household indebtedness. The “trap” is the worker’s inescapable dependency for survival on a job within a system that uses the threat of unemployment as a policy tool. The paper identifies the erosion of four key forces—competition, regulation, interoperability, and worker power, all of which held the tenuous postwar contract together—as the drivers of this enshittification. It concludes by articulating how the federal job guarantee proposal can act as a systemic circuit breaker capable of reverse reengineering the labor market. The job guarantee is not only an alternative to precarious employment and the NAIRU policy framework, but also a comprehensive de facto regulator that introduces much needed competition for labor by firms in the economy. The paper evaluates how the program can introduce countervailing forces to arrest the degradation of the labor market and establish a new standard for good jobs, thereby laying the foundation for a renewed social contract."
#Enshittification #Financialization #Economy #JobGuarantee #Capitalism #Unemployment #Neoliberalism
-
"If you live in the United States and feel like everything is caving in around you, like you are being attacked and fleeced from every angle, like you can’t breathe, like you can’t ever seem to catch a break despite doing everything seemingly right, like you are on the verge of a mental-health crisis and/or homelessness, your feelings are justified.
We are living in the middle of widespread societal breakdown. We are witnessing the erosion of an empire. We are experiencing the effects of a rotten system (capitalism) coming to its inevitable conclusion. Simply put, the capitalist class and their two political parties have run out of ways to steal from us. Because we have nothing left for them to take. So, the system is responding like a vampire who is unable to find the blood it needs to survive… erratic, rabid, frenzied, and increasingly desperate and violent, while frantically searching for new avenues of exploitation to keep it churning.
The collapse of the United States is not just happening on a whim. There are very clear, systemic reasons for it. It began in the 1970s/80s, mostly due to the inevitable trajectory of capitalism, which went through a series of late-stage developments throughout the 20th Century. These stages interacted with the realization of a globalized capitalist economy near the turn of the 21st Century and a conscious policy shift implemented by the capitalist state, commonly referred to as neoliberalism. An era of financialization, buoyed by monetary policy that caters to finance capital by feeding it a seemingly never-ending stream of free money, has paralleled these other developments to culminate into a desperate and destructive effort to feed the capitalist class during a time when the system’s profit rates are decades deep in perpetual decline."
#USA #Imperialism #Capitalism #Fascism #ProfitRates #Financialization
-
"If you live in the United States and feel like everything is caving in around you, like you are being attacked and fleeced from every angle, like you can’t breathe, like you can’t ever seem to catch a break despite doing everything seemingly right, like you are on the verge of a mental-health crisis and/or homelessness, your feelings are justified.
We are living in the middle of widespread societal breakdown. We are witnessing the erosion of an empire. We are experiencing the effects of a rotten system (capitalism) coming to its inevitable conclusion. Simply put, the capitalist class and their two political parties have run out of ways to steal from us. Because we have nothing left for them to take. So, the system is responding like a vampire who is unable to find the blood it needs to survive… erratic, rabid, frenzied, and increasingly desperate and violent, while frantically searching for new avenues of exploitation to keep it churning.
The collapse of the United States is not just happening on a whim. There are very clear, systemic reasons for it. It began in the 1970s/80s, mostly due to the inevitable trajectory of capitalism, which went through a series of late-stage developments throughout the 20th Century. These stages interacted with the realization of a globalized capitalist economy near the turn of the 21st Century and a conscious policy shift implemented by the capitalist state, commonly referred to as neoliberalism. An era of financialization, buoyed by monetary policy that caters to finance capital by feeding it a seemingly never-ending stream of free money, has paralleled these other developments to culminate into a desperate and destructive effort to feed the capitalist class during a time when the system’s profit rates are decades deep in perpetual decline."
#USA #Imperialism #Capitalism #Fascism #ProfitRates #Financialization
-
"If you live in the United States and feel like everything is caving in around you, like you are being attacked and fleeced from every angle, like you can’t breathe, like you can’t ever seem to catch a break despite doing everything seemingly right, like you are on the verge of a mental-health crisis and/or homelessness, your feelings are justified.
We are living in the middle of widespread societal breakdown. We are witnessing the erosion of an empire. We are experiencing the effects of a rotten system (capitalism) coming to its inevitable conclusion. Simply put, the capitalist class and their two political parties have run out of ways to steal from us. Because we have nothing left for them to take. So, the system is responding like a vampire who is unable to find the blood it needs to survive… erratic, rabid, frenzied, and increasingly desperate and violent, while frantically searching for new avenues of exploitation to keep it churning.
The collapse of the United States is not just happening on a whim. There are very clear, systemic reasons for it. It began in the 1970s/80s, mostly due to the inevitable trajectory of capitalism, which went through a series of late-stage developments throughout the 20th Century. These stages interacted with the realization of a globalized capitalist economy near the turn of the 21st Century and a conscious policy shift implemented by the capitalist state, commonly referred to as neoliberalism. An era of financialization, buoyed by monetary policy that caters to finance capital by feeding it a seemingly never-ending stream of free money, has paralleled these other developments to culminate into a desperate and destructive effort to feed the capitalist class during a time when the system’s profit rates are decades deep in perpetual decline."
#USA #Imperialism #Capitalism #Fascism #ProfitRates #Financialization
-
"If you live in the United States and feel like everything is caving in around you, like you are being attacked and fleeced from every angle, like you can’t breathe, like you can’t ever seem to catch a break despite doing everything seemingly right, like you are on the verge of a mental-health crisis and/or homelessness, your feelings are justified.
We are living in the middle of widespread societal breakdown. We are witnessing the erosion of an empire. We are experiencing the effects of a rotten system (capitalism) coming to its inevitable conclusion. Simply put, the capitalist class and their two political parties have run out of ways to steal from us. Because we have nothing left for them to take. So, the system is responding like a vampire who is unable to find the blood it needs to survive… erratic, rabid, frenzied, and increasingly desperate and violent, while frantically searching for new avenues of exploitation to keep it churning.
The collapse of the United States is not just happening on a whim. There are very clear, systemic reasons for it. It began in the 1970s/80s, mostly due to the inevitable trajectory of capitalism, which went through a series of late-stage developments throughout the 20th Century. These stages interacted with the realization of a globalized capitalist economy near the turn of the 21st Century and a conscious policy shift implemented by the capitalist state, commonly referred to as neoliberalism. An era of financialization, buoyed by monetary policy that caters to finance capital by feeding it a seemingly never-ending stream of free money, has paralleled these other developments to culminate into a desperate and destructive effort to feed the capitalist class during a time when the system’s profit rates are decades deep in perpetual decline."
#USA #Imperialism #Capitalism #Fascism #ProfitRates #Financialization
-
"If you live in the United States and feel like everything is caving in around you, like you are being attacked and fleeced from every angle, like you can’t breathe, like you can’t ever seem to catch a break despite doing everything seemingly right, like you are on the verge of a mental-health crisis and/or homelessness, your feelings are justified.
We are living in the middle of widespread societal breakdown. We are witnessing the erosion of an empire. We are experiencing the effects of a rotten system (capitalism) coming to its inevitable conclusion. Simply put, the capitalist class and their two political parties have run out of ways to steal from us. Because we have nothing left for them to take. So, the system is responding like a vampire who is unable to find the blood it needs to survive… erratic, rabid, frenzied, and increasingly desperate and violent, while frantically searching for new avenues of exploitation to keep it churning.
The collapse of the United States is not just happening on a whim. There are very clear, systemic reasons for it. It began in the 1970s/80s, mostly due to the inevitable trajectory of capitalism, which went through a series of late-stage developments throughout the 20th Century. These stages interacted with the realization of a globalized capitalist economy near the turn of the 21st Century and a conscious policy shift implemented by the capitalist state, commonly referred to as neoliberalism. An era of financialization, buoyed by monetary policy that caters to finance capital by feeding it a seemingly never-ending stream of free money, has paralleled these other developments to culminate into a desperate and destructive effort to feed the capitalist class during a time when the system’s profit rates are decades deep in perpetual decline."
#USA #Imperialism #Capitalism #Fascism #ProfitRates #Financialization
-
"As Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency continues to assault public-sector workers and their jobs even after Musk’s departure, and as Trump’s 2026 budget proposal slashes federal spending by more than 160 million next year—targeting programs for health, education, and housing as well as the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities—Cooper’s discussion of the privatized wealth of our age captures an economic dimension to Trumpism that often goes unremarked. Trump’s politics and his appeal are not only inspired by far-right ideologies, culture-war passions, age-old xenophobic prejudices, and a long-standing Republican animus toward the welfare state; they emerge out of a capitalist order that has ceased to be constrained by any of the institutional, intellectual, or professional limits that defined corporate capitalism in an earlier era. This is what sets the era of Trump apart from earlier epochs of conservatism: When Ronald Reagan took office, for example, he sought to remake the economic world by cutting income and capital-gains taxes, weakening organized labor, and deregulating finance in order to restore the profitability of American corporations. Trump, meanwhile, is bringing the norms, ideas, and practices of family business into the operations of the state. For Trump, the United States is just one large, privately held corporation, controlled and dominated by a few people who perceive themselves as able to do whatever they want. No stockholders, no activist shareholders, no debates or discussion, no annual meetings, no publicly released reports, no room for dissent or deliberation—just a tiny group of owners who enrich themselves while the rest of us stand on the sidelines."
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/donald-trump-theory-of-politics-state/#
#USA #Trump #Neoliberalism #LateStageCapitalism #PoliticalTheory #Austerity #PrivateEquity #Financialization #Capitalism
-
"Work described in this story was made possible in part by federal funding supported by taxpayers. At Harvard Medical School, the future of efforts like this — done in service to humanity — now hangs in the balance due to the government’s decision to terminate large numbers of federally funded grants and contracts across Harvard University.
Patient death rates increased in the emergency departments of U.S. hospitals acquired by private equity firms compared to similar hospitals not acquired by private equity, according to a nationwide study of hundreds of hospitals conducted by researchers at Harvard Medical School, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Chicago.
The results, published Sept. 23 in Annals of Internal Medicine, offer more concrete evidence that this for-profit ownership model of health care has led to higher patient mortality.
The federally funded study also found that private equity hospitals experienced large cuts in staffing and salaries, which the researchers propose is the likely explanation for the increase in patient deaths."
#USA #HealthCare #Hospitals #Financialization #PrivateEquity
-
"The US economy is turning into one giant bank.
Starbucks holds nearly $2 billion of customers’ money in its rewards program. That’s more than the total deposits managed by 85 percent of chartered banks, making the coffee chain one of the biggest financial institutions in the country.
Conversely, Capital One, one of the world’s top banks, now operates its own cafes on city street corners.
Airlines are now little more than flying banks, given that they make more money from selling frequent-flyer points to credit card companies than they do flying passengers.
More Americans than ever are in debt to their nearby grocery store due to predatory “buy now, pay later” loans offered during checkout.
As you’re wheeled into an emergency medical procedure, the nurse may ask if you’d prefer to pay on a deferred-payment loan plan, an increasingly common way to finance health care expenses.
And if you can’t pay your rent on time, it could soon become common for your apartment building owner to lend you the money, putting you in debt to your landlord.
These are snapshots of the new wave of financialization sweeping across the country, where the lines between finance and commerce are being blurred."
https://jacobin.com/2025/10/bankification-financialization-debt-interest-credit/
-
🦸🏽♂️ The gentrification of Mexican wrestling
https://english.elpais.com/international/2025-09-14/the-gentrification-of-mexican-wrestling.html
#mexico #wrestling #sports #culture #entertainment #gentrification #financialization
-
Capitalism exists to label and serialize objects in the world to facilitate capital accumulation. This is a very abstract metaphor, but the clearest way I've been able to begin to understand how those who already have capital use it to poke holes in markets.
