#financialization — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #financialization, aggregated by home.social.
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🧋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
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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
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#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)
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"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
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#Ireland's #housing policies delivered extraordinary wealth to investors, from the pockets of renters & home buyers. #Financialization of housing is working exactly as intended - and harming most people. High rise & tiny flats intensify wealth, without making enough homes.
Why do we keep voting for them?!
"The scale of #institutional ownership in certain places is staggering. In Ireland, nearly half of all units delivered since 2017 were purchased by investment funds."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/07/europe-financial-sector-house-prices-politics
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https://youtube.com/shorts/bE0_yikUr2U?feature=shared
Yeshhhh, your landlord doesn't provide YOU with housing because you rent his basement suite. You provide HIM with housing because he couldn't afford his big house WITHOUT YOU!
Mortgage helper? What a sweet phrase/lie.
#cdnpoli #canada #mexico #fascism #antifa #elbowsup #bcpoli #vancouver #burnaby #canlab #landlords #classconsciousness #capitalism #financialization
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Financial landlords are leading Toronto rent hikes. Waterloo researchers are first to prove corporations, such as private equity firms, drive up the prices of rental apartments in the city. https://uwaterloo.ca/news/financial-landlords-are-leading-toronto-rent-hikes #toronto #tore #realestate #cdnecon #cdnpoli #financialization #econ
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🤔 🏠 🇨🇦 'The Great Selloff: How Our Homes Became Someone Else’s Business.' - J. Pasalis https://youtu.be/U_mMnbmjc1g?si=_Mg4Um3Vdq0z7800 #tore #toronto #speculation #cdnpoli #cdnecon #labour #realestate #cdnhistory #financialization
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Financialization
Explore the scholarship on financialization in Canadian Food Studies! No paywalls! Just knowledge sharing!
#Read all you want! #OpenAccess
#Share generously! #KnowledgeSharing
#Grow your understanding of #Food
#Repeat#Farmland #Financialization #Concentration #RuralCommunity #CommunityFinancing #LocalInvestment #Cooperatives #SustainableFood #FoodSystems #SupplyChain #CanAg
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And — oh, here’s an interesting cash windfall — #Texas #Instruments raised about 💥$2.5 billion by selling stock over these five years.
Wait, what?
Selling stock, not buying stock? ⁉️
Selling stock to whom?
Hold that thought …
Put it all together and I figure the company generated about $25 billion in truly free cash flow over this 5-year span. ‼️
What is management going to spend this treasure chest on?
Well, surely you’re going to spend a healthy amount on #capital #expenditures, right?
I mean, you took a $5.2 billion depreciation and amortization charge over this time span,
and we all know that semiconductor manufacturers need to stay on that bleeding edge of technological innovation to keep earnings growing in the future, right?Nope.
Texas Instruments spent $3.3 billion on fixed assets from 2014 through 2018, one-third of that total in 2018.
Some significant proportion of that was maintenance capex as opposed to growth capex.
Well, if you didn’t spend your money on property, plant and equipment, then surely you spent a healthy sum in #MandA, right?
Nope. $1.6 billion over five years. Tuck-in stuff.
I guess you were paying down debt, then. #Deleveraging up a storm, right?
Nope. Paid down debt by $500 million a year in 2014, 2015 and 2016, but increased debt by $500 million in 2017 and $1 billion in 2018.
So it’s #dividends, right? This is where all the cash went?
Now we’re getting there:
⭐️$9.1 billion in dividends over five years. A healthy direct return of capital to shareholders.But it’s just a warm-up to the main event:
$15.4 billion in #buying #back #stock from 2014 through 2018.
⭐️Between stock buybacks and dividends, that’s $24.5 billion in cash “returned to shareholders”,
essentially 100% of the free cash flow generated by the company over the past five years.❗️
Now here’s the kicker.
What sort of share-count reduction would you think that this $15.4 billion in buybacks gets you?
I mean, that is the logic here, that investing $15.4 billion in the company’s own stock is the best possible capital allocation that the company can make.
I would have guessed that surely
$15.4 billion would retire anywhere from 20% to 25% of the shares outstanding over this time frame,
with the stock price ranging from $40 to $100.♦️In truth, Texas Instruments retired only 10% of its outstanding diluted shares with its $15.4 billion investment,
going from 1.1 billion shares to 990 million shares.⚠️But wait, there’s more.
From 2014 through 2018, Texas Instruments bought back 228.6 million shares for $15.4 billion.
That works out to an average ♦️purchase price of $67.37.
Over that same span, Texas Instruments sold 90.8 million shares to management and board members as they exercised options and restricted stock grants, for a total of $2.5 billion.
That works out to an average ♦️sale price of $27.51.
⚠️The difference in average purchase price and average sale price, multiplied by the number of shares so affected, is $3.6 billion.
🔥In other words, 40% of Texas Instrument’s stock buybacks over this five-year period
🧨were used to sterilize stock issuance to senior management and the board of directors, who received $3.6 billion in direct value from these buybacks.👀♦️But wait, there’s more …
As of Dec. 31, 2018 there were still 40 million shares outstanding in the form of options and restricted stock grants to management and directors,
at an average weighted exercise price of $55.At today’s stock price, that means an additional $2.6 billion in stock-based compensation has already been awarded.
Well golly, these surely must have been #amazing #managers and directors to warrant that sort of stock-based compensation in addition to their cash compensation.
This is the performance of Texas Instruments (in white) and the iShares PHLX Semiconductor ETF (in gold) over the same five years.
Texas Instruments is the fifth-largest position in that ETF and that underlying index, with a 7.1% weight.
⚠️For the past five years, Texas Instruments has been nothing more than a tracking stock for a passive semiconductor index.
🆘And for this privilege, shareholders have rewarded management and directors with
💰 $6.2 billion in stock, plus a couple of billion in cash compensation.‼️That’s why it’s never been a better time in the history of the world to be a senior manager of a publicly traded company.
It’s a crying shame, because here’s the thing … the total return on owning Texas Instruments is, in fact, 👉15% higher than the ETF over this five-year span.
❇️Because of the dividend.
Do you want to run your company for cash generation?
Do you want to return that cash to shareholders?
Great!
➡️ Use a special dividend, not buybacks.
There, fixed it for you.
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Texas Instruments recently caught my eye.
And while I decided to dig into its story, what happened isn’t unique to this company.
Texas Instruments is, in fact, a poster child for #financialization.
And there’s nothing illegal or incompetent about it.
I’m going to focus on a five-year stretch of the company’s financials,
from 2014 through 2018.This is where the truly meteoric stock-price appreciation took place over the past 10 years,
even with the stock market’s swoon in the fourth quarter of 2018,
and comparing full-year financials makes for a more apples-to-apples comparison.But before I get into the numbers, let me tell you the story.
The Texas Instruments story is free cash flow and earnings growth that management “returns to shareholders”.
Earnings per share on a fully diluted weighted basis has more than doubled from 2014 through 2018,
net income available to shareholders on a GAAP basis has doubled,
and cash from operations has almost doubled.What makes this a story of financialization is the why of the very real free cash flows and earnings growth and the how of the allocation of those cash flows and earnings.
The why is pretty simple. Management has cut its cost structure to the everlovin’ bone
#Share #buybacks -
Beef, Beans, or Byproducts?
Following Flexitarianism’s FinancesKelsey Speakman
#Flexitarianism #Canada #Supermarkets #CanadianBeef #PlantBased #Substitutes #Meat #Shopping #ESG #Financialization
#Read all you want! #OpenAccess
#Share generously! #KnowledgeSharing
#Grow your understanding of #Food
#Repeathttps://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/638
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Beef, Beans, or Byproducts?
Following Flexitarianism’s FinancesKelsey Speakman
#Flexitarianism #Canadian #Supermarkets #CanadianBeef #Beef #PlantBased #Shopping #MeatSubstitutes #Financialization #Canada #Loblaws #FoodPrices
#Read all you want! #OpenAccess
#Share generously! #KnowledgeSharing
#Grow your understanding of #Food
#Repeathttps://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/638
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“It is the Wild West out here”
Prairie farmers’ perspectives on farmland investment and land concentrationAndré Magnan
Mengistu Wendimu
Annette Aurélie Desmarais
Katherine Aske#Farmland #Financialization #LandConcentration #Rural #Community #Land #CanAg
#OpenScholarship from CFS!
#Read all you want! #OpenAccess
#Share generously! #KnowledgeSharing
#Grow your understanding of #Food
#Repeathttps://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/518
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End Wealth Supremacy https://otherwords.org/end-wealth-supremacy/
This anniversary is an opportunity to take a step back and look at the overarching problem here: “financialization.” While we used to have an economy that manufactured stuff, now it manufactures debt.
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Do you study #Food ?
Are you in the #CulinaryArts ? A #chef ? A #ChefInstructor? Working in the community on #FoodAccess ? A #Professor in #HigherEd or a #GradStudent in #GradSchoolLife ? A #CanAg #FoodActivist engaging with #FoodSovereignty ?
Looking for #CriticalScholarship on #Nutrition #FoodPolitics #financialization #FoodTrade #FoodWays #FoodCulture #BigData or a review of the latest #BooksAboutFood ?
Say hi!
Our #OpenAccess journal has a #NewIssue #ComingSoon !
Don't miss it!
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> I feel like there are now three constant processes in our world:
> 1) #Carcinisation - everything evolves to become a crab
> 2) #Financialization - eventually all business eventually turn into finance firms.
> 3) #Enshitification - all producers eventually strip-mine their reputations.
-srboisvert on #Metafilter
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@arzachel
The #bureaucrats and #policymakers have been trying to decouple #economicGrowth from #ecologicalImpact for years.Ie. Decouple #GDP from #consumption.
The general consensus was it wasn't possible without gross #financialization and #inequality.
Nothing's changed.
They just using COVID now to achieve an even more pronounced #neoFeudal #corporateState.
If you have symptoms, #JustKeepToYourself.
#covidJobs #uselessJobs #bullshitJobs #covidMarshall #quarantine #hyperAuthoritarianism
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(Quote of Leith van Onselen, continued)> "Over recent years we witnessed a proliferation of #construction faults and #flammableCladding fires at sites including #Lacrosse, #Neo200, #Opal, #Mascot, #Zetland, #Campsie, among others.
For more information, on this see the #FourCorners report, "#CrackingUp".
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