26 - Future Finance

Summary

Introduction

Financialization, aptly portrayed as a geographically non-neutral process and defined as a political project and ‘process of cultural and economic transformation’ (Christopherson et al, 2013: 352), has fundamentally changed our societies, especially the way we ‘value’ (attach a price tag to) things (for example, nature) and services (such as education, care for the elderly) (Christophers et al, 2017). The consequences of financialization have been diligently well documented through multiple manifestations as it drives inequality within our economies and societies. Important examples include the increasing financialization of care homes via ownership structures (Horton, 2022), the securitization of climate change– related catastrophe risk (Johnson, 2014) in the larger processes of clean energy transition (Knuth, 2018, Liu and Lai, 2021) and the rising assetization of public infrastructure (Kass et al, 2019; Deruytter et al, 2022). Further contributions provide valuable insights into the deepening impacts of financial exclusion on individuals trapped in long-term poverty (Loomis, 2018; Rosenman, 2019) and of households’ over-indebtedness on physical, mental and social well-being aided by gendered labour structures (Natarajan and Brickell, 2022) and racial capitalism (Ponder, 2021). Extensive changes in large-scale infrastructure financing (Liu and Dixon, 2022) and broader ramifications of fiscal deficiencies in urban areas (Tapp and Kay, 2019) complement these far-reaching changes across the micro-and meso-levels.

What is less well understood is how, why and where financial dominance is created and designed in the first place, and how particular places are able to subject other places to the control of financial metrics, motives and rationales. Indeed, finance has evolved from its traditionally intermediary role, although economic textbooks still speak, for example, of bank lending to ‘productive’ investments whereas in reality, loans for ‘unproductive’ transactions have become the norm (Ryan-Collins et al, 2017). The latter channels capital from companies to their shareholders and to real estate markets where it does not create jobs and value but rather inflates asset prices with repercussions on firms, households, the (built) environment and more generally, societies’ values and behaviour (for example, Hall and Leyshon, 2013; Lai, 2013; Heeg, 2016; Fields, 2017; Froud et al, 2017). In short, finance has evolved into a growth industry in its own right where key financial practices and motives embody and mediate financialized logics across places and space.