WHAT IS FINANCIALIZATION?

noun [fi·nan·cial·i·za·tion]

1. Finance is the management of money. “Financialization” refers to the increasing power of finance over the economy.
2. The financial industry’s share of the overall economy has tripled since World War II. The financial sector — Wall Street — finds a way to extract profit from every facet of our lives, our housing, our health, our education, and even our water.
3. Letting finance write the rules and dominate the economy harms the rest of us. Rather than channeling investments to projects that support jobs, families and communities, Wall Street executives and money managers are buying our elected leaders and rigging the rules in their favor in order to extract wealth from communities.
4. Wealth extraction in a financialized economy is not color blind. Wall Street targets communities of color, and especially women of color, for everything from predatory loans to higher rents to mass incarceration.
5. Financial executives often take a short-term “take the money and run” approach, which leads to booms and busts and makes our entire economy more unstable.