Still, for all that intelligence and innovation, the sector mostly produces immaterial financial assets or metaphoric wealth – in other words, practically nothing of tangible or lasting value. From one angle, in fact, it destroys value: liquidating public assets by privatizing services, foreclosing on homes and businesses, and imposing austerity measures that funnel social wealth upwards to an apparently lawless global oligarchy. Financial forces also superintend a global economic system that is characterized by a massively unfair global division of creative labour, where creative opportunities are reserved for a fraction of the world’s population (mostly in Northern cities). The remainder spend longer days and shorter lives in fields, factories and kitchens, with little opportunity to practise creativity and even less to have it recognized or valued. Most of the wealth “created” by the financial sector is, in a sense, derivative – it derives its value as a reflection or means of representing real-world labour and wealth. Finance, at least at first blush, appears to be a glitzy simulacrum of value that nonetheless disciplines and (dis)orients the economic and social world. In this sense, finance is, a form of class war, which synthesizes, aggregates and puts to work the creativity of the financial “industry” in the interests of perpetuating and, indeed, more deeply entrenching reigning inequalities and forms of exploitation.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 409