A final disturbing effect of financialization can’t be proven with statistics or experts’ quotes. It’s the damage to the human spirit that comes from making everything everyone is or does literally and strictly reducible to dollars and cents, and how such a cynical system makes everyone in it more cynical. A finance-obsessed society makes us each a little less human, a lot more of an abstraction. An employee of an LBO’d company is only a cost that needs to be kept down or eliminated. A shopper is a credit rating. Somebody with a home mortgage is an anonymous revenue stream—and barely that
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