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#financialization

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"If you live in the United States and feel like everything is caving in around you, like you are being attacked and fleeced from every angle, like you can’t breathe, like you can’t ever seem to catch a break despite doing everything seemingly right, like you are on the verge of a mental-health crisis and/or homelessness, your feelings are justified.

We are living in the middle of widespread societal breakdown. We are witnessing the erosion of an empire. We are experiencing the effects of a rotten system (capitalism) coming to its inevitable conclusion. Simply put, the capitalist class and their two political parties have run out of ways to steal from us. Because we have nothing left for them to take. So, the system is responding like a vampire who is unable to find the blood it needs to survive… erratic, rabid, frenzied, and increasingly desperate and violent, while frantically searching for new avenues of exploitation to keep it churning.

The collapse of the United States is not just happening on a whim. There are very clear, systemic reasons for it. It began in the 1970s/80s, mostly due to the inevitable trajectory of capitalism, which went through a series of late-stage developments throughout the 20th Century. These stages interacted with the realization of a globalized capitalist economy near the turn of the 21st Century and a conscious policy shift implemented by the capitalist state, commonly referred to as neoliberalism. An era of financialization, buoyed by monetary policy that caters to finance capital by feeding it a seemingly never-ending stream of free money, has paralleled these other developments to culminate into a desperate and destructive effort to feed the capitalist class during a time when the system’s profit rates are decades deep in perpetual decline."

hamptonthink.org/read/the-end-

Hampton InstituteThe End of an Empire: Systemic Decay and the Economic Foundation of American Fascism — Hampton InstituteBy Colin Jenkins If you live in the United States and feel like everything is caving in around you, like you are being attacked and fleeced from every angle, like you can’t breathe, like you can’t ever seem to catch a break despite doing everything seemingly right, like you are on the verge of

"As Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency continues to assault public-sector workers and their jobs even after Musk’s departure, and as Trump’s 2026 budget proposal slashes federal spending by more than 160 million next year—targeting programs for health, education, and housing as well as the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities—Cooper’s discussion of the privatized wealth of our age captures an economic dimension to Trumpism that often goes unremarked. Trump’s politics and his appeal are not only inspired by far-right ideologies, culture-­war passions, age-old xenophobic prejudices, and a long-standing Republican animus toward the welfare state; they emerge out of a capitalist order that has ceased to be constrained by any of the institutional, intellectual, or professional limits that defined corporate capitalism in an earlier era. This is what sets the era of Trump apart from earlier epochs of conservatism: When Ronald Reagan took office, for example, he sought to remake the economic world by cutting income and capital-gains taxes, weakening organized labor, and deregulating finance in order to restore the profitability of American corporations. Trump, meanwhile, is bringing the norms, ideas, and practices of family business into the operations of the state. For Trump, the United States is just one large, privately held corporation, controlled and dominated by a few people who perceive themselves as able to do whatever they want. No stockholders, no activist shareholders, no debates or discussion, no annual meetings, no publicly released reports, no room for dissent or deliberation—just a tiny group of owners who enrich themselves while the rest of us stand on the sidelines."

thenation.com/article/society/

The Nation · How the Capitalism of the 1980s Created Donald Trump’s Theory of the StateThe proliferation of privately held companies during the Reagan years laid the foundations for Trump’s approach to government.

"Work described in this story was made possible in part by federal funding supported by taxpayers. At Harvard Medical School, the future of efforts like this — done in service to humanity — now hangs in the balance due to the government’s decision to terminate large numbers of federally funded grants and contracts across Harvard University.

Patient death rates increased in the emergency departments of U.S. hospitals acquired by private equity firms compared to similar hospitals not acquired by private equity, according to a nationwide study of hundreds of hospitals conducted by researchers at Harvard Medical School, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Chicago.

The results, published Sept. 23 in Annals of Internal Medicine, offer more concrete evidence that this for-profit ownership model of health care has led to higher patient mortality.

The federally funded study also found that private equity hospitals experienced large cuts in staffing and salaries, which the researchers propose is the likely explanation for the increase in patient deaths."

hms.harvard.edu/news/deaths-ro

"The US economy is turning into one giant bank.

Starbucks holds nearly $2 billion of customers’ money in its rewards program. That’s more than the total deposits managed by 85 percent of chartered banks, making the coffee chain one of the biggest financial institutions in the country.

Conversely, Capital One, one of the world’s top banks, now operates its own cafes on city street corners.

Airlines are now little more than flying banks, given that they make more money from selling frequent-flyer points to credit card companies than they do flying passengers.

More Americans than ever are in debt to their nearby grocery store due to predatory “buy now, pay later” loans offered during checkout.

As you’re wheeled into an emergency medical procedure, the nurse may ask if you’d prefer to pay on a deferred-payment loan plan, an increasingly common way to finance health care expenses.

And if you can’t pay your rent on time, it could soon become common for your apartment building owner to lend you the money, putting you in debt to your landlord.

These are snapshots of the new wave of financialization sweeping across the country, where the lines between finance and commerce are being blurred."

jacobin.com/2025/10/bankificat

jacobin.comEverything Is Becoming a BankMost major corporations — from airlines to social media platforms — now aspire to become unregulated banks. Bankification today accounts for the highest profit margins in the US economy, crippling productive capacity and setting the stage for the next crash.
#USA#Banks#Banking

Capitalism exists to label and serialize objects in the world to facilitate capital accumulation. This is a very abstract metaphor, but the clearest way I've been able to begin to understand how those who already have capital use it to poke holes in markets.

misaligned.markets/capitalism-

Misaligned Markets · Capitalism runs like a computer (and it's being hacked)Like computer networks, market capitalism rewards actors that exploit gaps created by system and user behavior.

"In 2025, the national Housing Wage is $33.63 per hour for a modest two-bedroom rental home and $28.17 for a modest one-bedroom. Figure 1 provides state-specific two-bedroom Housing Wages, reflecting the wide variation in housing costs across the country. As this report demonstrates, these required wages far exceed not just the federal minimum wage but also the median wages of workers in many of the most common occupations, such as home health aides, food service workers, and administrative assistants. Almost half of all U.S. workers earn less than the hourly wage required to afford a modest one-bedroom rental home (BLS, 2024).
(...)
Even after factoring in higher state and local minimum wages, the
average minimum-wage worker in the U.S. must work 116 hours
per week—nearly three full-time jobs—to afford a modest two bedroom rental home at Fair Market Rent. To afford a modest one-bedroom rental home, they would need to work 97 hours per week, or 2.4 full-time jobs. Higher minimum wages, however, are insufficient in addressing the housing affordability crisis. In each of the 64 counties and municipalities with minimum wages above both state and federal levels, local minimum wages still fall short of the local Housing Wage for both one- and two-bedroom rental homes
(...)
As shown in Figure 2, more than half of all wage earners
cannot afford a modest one-bedroom rental home at Fair Market
Rent while working full-time. At least 60% cannot afford a modest two-bedroom rental home while working full-time. In 2025, the average hourly wage earned by renters is $23.60, which is $10.03 less than the national two-bedroom Housing Wage of $33.63 and $4.57 less than the one-bedroom Housing Wage of $28.17. In 49 states, the average renter wage is not enough to afford a two bedroom rental. In 37 states, it falls short of affording even a one bedroom rental."

nlihc.org/oor

National Low Income Housing CoalitionOut of Reach#OOR25 shows how difficult it is for renters to find affordable housing. Find out how much a renter must earn to afford a modest home at https://nlihc.org/oor
#USA#Housing#Rents

#Ireland's #housing policies delivered extraordinary wealth to investors, from the pockets of renters & home buyers. #Financialization of housing is working exactly as intended - and harming most people. High rise & tiny flats intensify wealth, without making enough homes.

Why do we keep voting for them?!

"The scale of #institutional ownership in certain places is staggering. In Ireland, nearly half of all units delivered since 2017 were purchased by investment funds."

theguardian.com/commentisfree/

The Guardian · Across Europe, the financial sector has pushed up house prices. It’s a political timebombBy Tim White

Quase metade das casas em Lisboa não têm como finalidade a habitação e tanta gente à procura de casa na Área Metropolitana de Lisboa. Depois digam mal dos okupas, digam. Especulai à vontade enquanto que o pessoal sem casa dorme na rua ao frio e à chuva...

"Before 2008, gentrification was largely absent from many central Lisbon neighbourhoods – areas primarily inhabited by poor, elderly residents living in deteriorating buildings. Investment certainly brought building rehabilitation, but it didn’t translate into residential stability. Despite the improvements, the centre of the city lost 25% of its population between 2011 and 2021. Across the municipality, of the dwellings built or renovated between during this period, only 56.5% serve as primary residences. The rest are either vacant, used as second homes, or converted into short-term rentals.

All this contradicts the neoliberal supply and demand story as the escalation of property prices is not linked to an actual demand for homes to live in and the formation of new households. Instead, what we see is that Lisbon is now on the radar of investors who use housing as a financial asset: a process where real estate is produced not to meet residential needs, but to maximise returns. In a context shaped by a flexible rental law, local landlords have capitalised on this shift, engaging in rentier practices by steadily raising rents and extracting increasing value from a shrinking pool of habitable homes.

The result is a city that welcomes foreign wealth but excludes many of its own citizens, prioritising the desires of global consumers over the needs of local communities. The current housing crisis reflects a stark disconnect between wages and property prices – with housing costs approaching those of global cities in a country where salaries remain among the lowest in Europe."

theguardian.com/commentisfree/

The Guardian · How Lisbon put itself on the map for real estate and tourism – and became Europe’s least affordable cityBy Agustín Cocola-Gant

"In line with its ‘timeful’ approach, the book starts working towards its end once we arrive at financialization in the form to which we are accustomed. By this point, Bicocca is almost completely stripped of its old working-class identity. Though the authors do not write in a melodramatic tone here, it’s sad to see that, after a century of struggle, the area is now known as a ‘no-man’s-land’. It was not always planned like this; in the 1980s, Pirelli’s plan was to turn Bicocca into a leading centre of high-tech industrial development named ‘Technocity’. But already by the 1990s, company management realized that basing the neighbourhood’s development entirely on real-estate speculation was much more profitable. In stark contrast, then, with the supposedly ‘dynamic’ financial markets determining the rhythm of its development, Bicocca is now best described by the authors as ‘decaffeinated urbanity’.

In that sense, Class Meets Land reminds more of the financial markets it takes issue with than of present-day Bicocca: it’s a fast-paced book, in the best sense of the word, and nowhere do the authors trip into excessive theoretical reflection. Yet, its biggest strength lies in Kaika and Ruggiero’s methodological insistence: the struggle between class and capital is never lost sight of, and each historical event is neatly related to what preceded and followed it. As such, they make a convincing case for approaching financialization in its specific historical context and from the perspective of local class struggles."

marxandphilosophy.org.uk/revie

marxandphilosophy.org.uk‘Class Meets Land: The Embodied History of Land Financialization’ by Maria Kaika and Luca Ruggiero reviewed by Victor StoutWith the increasing financialization of our everyday lives, land financialization has been a pressing concern for critical geographers and urbanists alike. Typically, studies on the phenomenon take a grand view, focusing, for example, on the role of global capital flows, or treating financialization as a ‘new’ regime of accumulation. But the more practical implications of financialization tend to stay underexamined in these more macro-level analyses. In Class Meets Land: The Embodied History of Land Financialization, Maria Kaika and Luca Ruggiero – professors in Urban Planning and Political Geography respectively –take a different direction: they approach the financialization of land from…

"Examining the intricate interplay between private foundations, resilience, and the neoliberal system allows for an exploration of how disasters, particularly those driven by climate change, are perceived as opportunities for development within a neoliberal society. This research endeavors to answer the question: How does the instrumentalization of resilience by private foundations contribute to the development of financialization in disaster assistance?"

#ClimateResilience
#ClimateAdaptation
#DisasterMining
#financialization

sciencedirect.com/science/arti