#doodle #Iran and betting on #war
#prediction markets provide #financialization of #geopolitical risk:
The ethical critique is straightforward:
If you can profit from escalation: #incentive -> #distortion risk
Concerns: Information #manipulation, #disinformation campaigns and political #influence incentives
#Financialization
The housing crisis in one graph.
Source: https://www.metabolic.nl/publications/fertile-ground/, full report, p. 22
Ein lesenswerter, kritischer Artikel über die Finanzindustrie, u.a. über die Zusammenhänge zwischen der #Financialization der Wirtschaft und stagnierender Produktivität bzw. geringen Infrastruktur-Investitionen:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/opinion/capitalism-industry-financialization.html
I'll see your "enshittification" and raise you a "financialization."
Topical ribaldry aside, I think financialization is the larger concept that enshittification sits inside, and is the core problem we need to fix, especially in the US.
Say it with me people: CAMPAIGN. FINANCE. REFORM.
Interesting that this was written by an old-school conservative.
Or, if you have NY Times access: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/opinion/capitalism-industry-financialization.html
“ #financialization is the least studied and least explored reason behind our inability to create a #sharedprosperity.” open.substack.com/pub/annpetti... #USdollar #MarkCarney
Trump and Bessent Trash the Do...
🚨 Breaking News: Private equity firms bought 500 autism centers in a decade! Who knew the solution to medical care was a spreadsheet and not, you know, actual care? 📈💉 What's next? Hedge funds managing daycares? 🙄
https://www.brown.edu/news/2026-01-07/private-equity-autism-centers #PrivateEquity #AutismCare #MedicalIndustry #HealthcareNews #Financialization #HackerNews #ngated
📚 New publication! Former #USFInternationalFellow Deborah Fromm has a new article out: “The business of protection: Insuring urban violence risks in contemporary Brazil.” 🔗 Read more: doi.org/10.1080/0308... #UrbanStudies #Financialization #Brazil
Digesting Food Studies—Episode 112: Centralization of Power in Food Systems
https://rss.com/podcasts/digesting-food-studies/2382014/
There’s a lot of power in food and food systems: care and nurturing, regeneration and resilience. The power to feed, to refuse food, and to transform landscapes. And then there’s petroleum, data, GMOs, and pesticides; financialization, tractors, and land-grabbing…
This episode explores how corporations and governments operate and control spaces of production and transformation, with articles from Vol. 2, No. 2 of CFS, which our guest, Jennifer Clapp, co–guest edited. (https://doi.org/10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i2)
Alexia Moyer shares learnings from Brian Brett’s book, Trauma Farm, and PhD student Heidi Janes responds to a selection of CFS articles about corporate power.
#DigestingFoodStudies
#FoodSystems
#Agriculture
#Farming
#Pesticides
#Fertilizer
#Tractors
#PrecisionAgriculture
#Financialization
#LandGrabbing
#Palestine
#Gaza
#Power
#Capitalism
#BrianBrett
#TraumaFarm
#Academia
#FoodPodcast
image: Johnson Martin, Pixabay
Rich Dicks Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara want to “financialize everything!”
#RichDick #Kalshi #betting #financialization #gambling
https://means.tv/programs/mmn-daily_12525?category_id=34135
📉 COP30: Zimbabwe's forest and energy projects reveal the downside of carbon credits
https://phys.org/news/2025-11-cop30-zimbabwe-forest-energy-reveal.html
#zimbabwe #africa #climatechange #carboncredits #crime #fraud #corruption #financialization
"The reality is lenders and private credit funds are not so distinct. The two have entwined their fates, with banks extending hundreds of billions of dollars in financing that boosts private credit funds’ returns.
Regulators, economists and government officials have started to voice concerns.
The IMF last month warned “beneath the calm surface, the ground is shifting”. The European Central Bank has observed that links between banks and private credit are creating channels through which “shocks can be transmitted, amplified and redistributed” across the financial system.
One senior private credit executive put it more bluntly: “The [private credit] model is going to be pushed to extremes.”
“This was the problem in 2008, we got to the end of the possible in the banking system and then we were lifting cushions in the conference rooms in the hope that someone’s coins fell out.”
These are the ties between banks and private credit funds that have fuelled the rise of non-bank financing."
https://www.ft.com/content/535b3d0c-429c-4e67-a73d-3513e4e730d8
#Banks #Banking #CreditBoom #Finance #Financialization #PrivateCreditFunds
"Q: India still has ambitions of becoming a global manufacturing hub. Governments have tried to push it for two decades—Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched “Make in India” in 2014. Yet India has failed. It missed both waves of manufacturing diversification out of China; those investments went to South East Asia instead. Why does India repeatedly fail to industrialise?
A: I think, ultimately, that has to do with the political economy. Your business elites do not want serious industrialisation. The business elites are either in the financial sector or, even if they are in the industrial sector, they still have very strong links with financial capital which doesn’t like industrialisation because, for them, the most important thing is the rate of return.
In the short run, if you want to develop a serious industrial base, you need to go through a period when finance is repressed. Because if shareholders keep asking for money [in the form of return on investment], companies would not have the money to invest.
(...)
You need to invest in worker skills, infrastructure, and research and development (R&D). I looked up the latest data on R&D in India, and as a proportion of GDP, it is barely 0.6 per cent, compared to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) average of 3 per cent, and South Korea’s 5.2 per cent.
I am afraid that there is no serious attempt to develop manufacturing in India. Yes, earlier India built manufacturing industries, but there was no ambition to join the global economy. And later, [the government and companies] did say that they want to develop manufacturing, but they did not do anything serious because they did not want to forego their short-term interests in order to have a more dynamic, industrially driven economy."
#India #Financialization #Industrialization #PoliticalEconomy
I watched a community theatre show last night (which was fantastic). It got me thinking about financialisation, and how it leads the hard right to routinely conflate the economically productive and the financially profitable. As if they're one and the same.
(1/?)
#authoritarianism #banking #birthrate #capitalism #civilwar #civilization #climatechange #commercialism #corporatism #consumerism #culture #crime #debt #democracy #education #economics #financialization #finance #governance #housing #health #history #immigration #individualism #intelligence #mafia #macroeconomics #monotheism #money #monopoly #military #media #nationalism #natality #politics #power #psychology #religion #society #sociology #uspol #war #wealth
(4/6)
"Private equity firms and other alternative asset managers — including Ares Management Corp., Blackstone Inc., Brookfield Corp. and KKR & Co. — are reshaping the once-staid world of life insurance. Over the past decade, they’ve bought, built or partnered with insurers that sell policies and annuities, collectively commanding hundreds of billions of dollars.
In a previous era, life insurers parked their money in the safest corners of the market — mostly high-grade bonds and big-name stocks. But as Wall Street firms expanded into the business, they adopted bolder strategies to boost profits.
Many are shifting liabilities to offshore affiliates subject to less detailed disclosure requirements than in the US. Insurers and those overseas entities are also pursuing higher returns with more sophisticated and potentially less-liquid investments — such as exotic asset-backed securities and other bets tied to private credit or private equity.
Athene has become a trendsetter in other ways. It invests in deals and products from Apollo’s asset management division. It also taps cheap financing from a government-backed system designed to support home loans, which can be reinvested to amplify returns.
Its profits have set off a stampede of imitators, prompting experts — such as researchers at the Bank for International Settlements — to suggest they may be adding risks to the system.""
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-america-insurance-part-1/
#USA #PrivateEquity #CasinoCapitalism #WallStreet #Financialization #Athene #LifeInsurance #Retirement
“Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing”*…
In a follow-on (in a fashion) to an (R)D earlier this month on financialization and gambling, Liz Hoffman on the striking changes underway in the financial sector…
Wall Street is starting to look a bit like a stage drama where nobody is playing the part that casting assigned.
To build a giant Louisiana data center, Meta raised $29 billion in equity from Blue Owl (a firm known for private credit) and private credit from PIMCO (a firm known for public bonds). Google has piles of cash and a red-hot stock, but is instead bringing its pristine credit rating to the deal table, backstopping crypto miners. The $7 billion that KKR and Apollo are putting into Keurig Dr Pepper is “equity” in the sense that it will help KDP reduce its debt load. But it isn’t coming from their traditional PE funds.
You think companies are built with equity and debt? That’s cute, today’s masters of the universe will chuckle while patting your head.
What used to be called simply “investing” or “lending” has been replaced by “capital solutions” — hybrid equity, kickers, and cash flows tailored to match the returns promised to investors on the other side. Growing pots of money now resemble liquid sand, moldable into whatever shape will fit the money hole in front of it. This shift has been obscured by narratives, overcooked in my view, about a battle between private credit and banks: “There’s one system,” Goldman Sachs President John Waldron told me a few weeks ago, and it’s changing quickly.
Goldman reorganized itself along these lines earlier this year… Apollo, one of the original private-equity firms, is now 80% credit… and firms from Chicago buyout shops to Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds have launched “capital solutions” arms. Lawyers are jumping in downstream.
Prioritizing what companies actually need over whatever widgets Wall Street happens to sell is good customer service. Personal wealth management got a lot better when firms started asking “how much do you need to retire?” instead of “would you like to buy this structured note?”
And the rise of insurance money in investing has created patient capital that in many cases fits those money holes better than blunter instruments. Much of KKR and Apollo’s Keurig investment will end up in their insurance arms, backed by long-term contracts with the coffee-pod maker, people familiar with the matter said.
But flexible capital will almost certainly overflex, and not everyone with “go-anywhere” money should go anywhere. I suspect that before this cycle is over, we’ll see a few instances that leave everyone asking, “why did they own that?”… Sometimes “capital solutions” just code for investing in distressed companies, which is nothing if not a capital problem in search of a solution, trade publication Private Debt Investor wrote…
“What Wall Street’s obsession with ‘capital solutions’ tells us,” from @semafor.com.
[Image above: source]
* Warren Buffett
###
As we go back to basics, we might note that it’s International Accounting Day– a celebration of the field on this date each year that commemorates the publication of Luca Pacioli’s seminal work, Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita, in 1494, which introduced the double-entry bookkeeping system—a foundational element of modern accounting.
#accounting #business #capital #capitalSolutions #culture #doubleEntryBookkeeping #finance #financialization #history #InternationalAccountingDay #LucaPacioli #money #politics #risk #WallStreet
"This paper employs the concept of “enshittification”—the systematic degradation of a service or product in the pursuit of profit—as a powerful metaphor to analyze the decay of the US labor market in the postwar era. Situating this process within Hyman Minsky’s theory of capitalist development, it argues that the current phase of money manager capitalism has accelerated a pervasive “bait-and-switch” dynamic that has emerged since the 1970s. The “bait” was the postwar social contract, which promised but never guaranteed economic security through tight full employment and access to good jobs for all. The “switch” was the neoliberal policy shift that dismantled labor protections, weaponized unemployment (via the NAIRU doctrine), and fostered financialization, leading to stagnant wages, precarity, and household indebtedness. The “trap” is the worker’s inescapable dependency for survival on a job within a system that uses the threat of unemployment as a policy tool. The paper identifies the erosion of four key forces—competition, regulation, interoperability, and worker power, all of which held the tenuous postwar contract together—as the drivers of this enshittification. It concludes by articulating how the federal job guarantee proposal can act as a systemic circuit breaker capable of reverse reengineering the labor market. The job guarantee is not only an alternative to precarious employment and the NAIRU policy framework, but also a comprehensive de facto regulator that introduces much needed competition for labor by firms in the economy. The paper evaluates how the program can introduce countervailing forces to arrest the degradation of the labor market and establish a new standard for good jobs, thereby laying the foundation for a renewed social contract."
#Enshittification #Financialization #Economy #JobGuarantee #Capitalism #Unemployment #Neoliberalism
"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."
#USA #Imperialism #Capitalism #Fascism #ProfitRates #Financialization
"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."
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/donald-trump-theory-of-politics-state/#
#USA #Trump #Neoliberalism #LateStageCapitalism #PoliticalTheory #Austerity #PrivateEquity #Financialization #Capitalism
Client Info
Server: https://mastodon.social
Version: 2025.07
Repository: https://github.com/cyevgeniy/lmst