Ebook: Fictitious Capital: How Finance Is Appropriating Our Future

How finance is a mechanism of social and political domination
The turbulence of the financial markets is often explained in terms of the immorality of market agents, misguided economic theory or unsuitable regulation. Even when these explanations are not false ones, they leave aside the main problem: the nature of financial value.
Starting out from the concept of fictitious capital, Cédric Durand argues that finance pre-empts future production, appropriating for itself wealth that is yet to be created. Using comparative data covering the last four decades, he shows that the rise in private and public debt, the enormous proliferation of financial products, the promotion of the norm that value is created for shareholders, and even public authorities' steps to encourage financial stability, all contribute to the same mechanism of social and political domination.
If at one time the increasing sophistication of finance allowed the masking of the growing...