Costas Lapavitsas is professor of economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and author of “Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All.” During 2015, he was a member of the Greek Parliament collaborating with the governing Syriza party.
Financialization is an awkward word, but it captures a prominent aspect of contemporary capitalism: During the last several decades, the financial sector has grown in extraordinary ways, even to the point of dominating economies.
Some consider the ascendancy of finance to be the result of government policy. There is no doubt that in the U.S., the country that best exemplifies financialization, deregulation by the government has benefitted Wall Street. However, the phenomenon of financialization is so widely observed across the world that it calls for a fuller explanation. Indeed, it is more plausible that government policy has favored finance because deeper trends in economy and society have already made financialization an underlying reality.
– The Washington Post