The Grip of Finance

From financialisation to assetization: grasping the challenges posed by contemporary capitalism from a feminist perspective.

Since the turn of the century, and especially after the 2008 global financial crisis, it has become quite evident that changes in the capitalist accumulation regime under neoliberalism have been driven significantly by finance. Financialisation and assetisation, driven on steroids by global financial actors after the Wall Street Consensus, have radically reshaped the global economy, skyrocketing wealth and income concentration in very few hands.

Financialisation refers to the shift in the economy where capital is invested not for production as traditionally happened under capitalism, but rather to generate more capital. In the current stage of capitalism the accumulation of industrial and commercial capital has been subordinated to the logic of financial accumulation and the extraction of financial profits. This has resulted in a transfer of wealth from the real economy to the financial sector and led to the accumulation of interest for creditors and debt for borrowers.

Assetisation refers to the transformation of products, nature, processes, and services into assets in order to extract a return on investments and provide sources for regular income streams. This process leads to the continuous formation of fictitious capital, enhancing and deepening financialisation and rent extraction.

Thus, assetisation and financialisation are fundamental elements of value extraction and dispossession of the majority but these mechanisms prove to be very seductive in an increasingly individualistic and short-sighted world and nothing seems to escape the grip of finance.

Instead of establishing a redistributive tax system to secure resources for national development, Governments call in the financial sector while implementing austerity policies. As social provision is increasingly being privatised and given insufficient public resources, institutions like hospitals are issuing bonds to raise funds. Sustainable, green and gender bonds are attracting global investors who determine where to invest and for how long, thereby having a say in the design and objectives of public policies at the domestic level.

The increasing reliance on asset-based welfare and private finance to address public needs weakens democracy, as decisions about public goods and services are increasingly controlled by private investors.

In this project we navigate all these issues and wonder what a feminist approach to finance
would look like?