For Lazarrato, finance represents a historic bloc of capitalist forces. The wealth of the financial sector exists because of the debts of actors as small as individuals and as large as nation-states, and this wealth and this debt are used to discipline these actors into compliance with an emerging global capitalist paradigm which is based not as much on the extraction of surplus value but more on the production of financialized, debt-driven subjectivities.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 90