Work Package Leader

UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS UNIVLEEDS, United Kingdom

Objectives

The central objective of this work package will be to explore the possible evolutions of financialisation, the financial sector and relevant policies over a 15 to 20 year time horizon.

The work in this work package would be organised around the theme of the future of the financial sector and of financialisation;

In our proposal eight features of the era of financialisation, which could be taken as emerging around 1980, were outlined.

These eight features were:

  • Large-scale expansion and proliferation of financial markets over the past thirty years.
  • The process has been closely interwoven with de-regulation of the financial system itself and the economy more generally.
  • Financialisation, understood as both the expansion and the proliferation of financial instruments and services, has been associated with the birth of a whole range of financial institutions and markets.
  • At a systemic level, financialisation has been located in terms of the dominance of finance over industry.
  • Financialisation is strongly associated with market mechanisms, complemented or even reinforced by policies that have underpinned rising inequality of incomes and of inequality more generally.
  • Consumption has often been sustained by the extension of credit.
  • Not merely the expansion and proliferation of financial instruments and markets that are striking but also the penetration of such financing into a widening range of both economic and social reproduction.
  • Financialisation is associated with a particular culture.

Giuseppe Fontana Interview

DELIVERABLES