Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T07:22:26.116Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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: [email protected]
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

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

References

Brunnermeier, M. and Pedersen, L. (2009) Market liquidity and funding liquidity. Review of Financial Studies, 22(6): 2201–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Copeland, M. (1952) A Study of Moneyflows in the United States. New York, NY: National Bureau of Economic Research.Google Scholar
Graeber, D. (2011) Debt: The First 5,000 Years. New York, NY: Melville House.Google Scholar
Harris, L. (2003) Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hawtrey, R.G. (1932) The Art of Central Banking. London: Longmans, Green and Co.Google Scholar
Hicks, J. (1989) A Market Theory of Money. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mehrling, P. (2013a) The inherent hierarchy of money and credit. In: Taylor, L., Rezai, A. and Michl, T. (eds.) Social Fairness and Economics: Economic Essays in the Spirit of Duncan Foley. New York, NY: Routledge, 394–404.Google Scholar
Mehrling, P. (2013b) Essential hybridity: A money view of FX. Journal of Comparative Economics, 41(2): 355–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mehrling, P., Pozsar, Z., Sweeney, J. and Nielson, D. (2014) Bagehot was a shadow banker: Shadow banking, central banking, and the future of global finance. In: Claessens, S., Evanoff, D. and Laeven, L. (eds.) Shadow Banking Within and Across Borders. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing.Google Scholar
Mehrling, P. and Neilson, D. (2014) A new measure of liquidity premium. In: Epstein, G., Schlesinger, T. and Vernengo, M. (eds.) Banking, Monetary Policy and the Political Economy of Financial Regulation. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 290–318.Google Scholar
Minsky, H.P. (1967) Financial intermediation in the money and capital markets. In: Pontecorvo, G., Shay, R. and Hart, A. (eds.) Issues in Banking and Monetary Analysis. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 33–56.Google Scholar
Minsky, H.P. (2004) Induced Investment and Business Cycles. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Polanyi, K. (1944) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. New York, NY: Farrar & Rinehart.Google Scholar
Stiglitz, J. (2002) Globalization and its Discontents. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.Google Scholar