Financial Capitalism Is More Dangerous Than Ever Today
The crash of 2008 was supposed to augur the end of ultraspeculative financial capitalism. But financial actors have actually gone from strength to strength since then, and fictitious capital is a bigger menace to global economic stability than ever.
Signage for a Bitcoin ATM in Barcelona, Spain, on November 11, 2024. (Angel Garcia / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Some writers have taken the period since the crisis of financial capitalism in 2008 to mark the “end of neoliberalism” or the advent of “post-neoliberalism.” Others have described it as a “mutant,” “zombie” iteration of a neoliberalism that is in effect “half-dead, half-alive.”
In an era of rising protectionism, right-wing ideology, and deglobalization, neoliberal ideologies have certainly experienced a backlash. But they have also rearticulated themselves by forging new alliances and taking on novel forms. Three dimensions of the current conjuncture are worth highlighting.
The Politics of Money
Today, as in the 1960s, there is an immense interest in the form that money takes as a central factor in politics and social life. Monetary policy is more than ever a political question of direct concern to people otherwise uninterested in its arcana. There is reason to think that the global system of money and finance is approaching a disruptive threshold of historic significance, with the potential to change how societies invest, insure, and trade.
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