In Chapter 2, I take up the theme of precariousness, a term that has emerged among scholars and activists over the last 20 years to describe the new timbre of work and life in a highly financialized age when life’s risks have been dramatically privatized and downloaded from governments and corporations onto individuals and everyday life. I argue that precariousness is not incidental to financialization; they are deeply and structurally linked, and, indeed, financialization helps create a stark and troubling bifurcation and hierarchy of precarity. At its top, I explore the example of the quintessential icon of the Wall Street financier, the lauded “risk-taker,” whose personal and professional embrace of precariousness as an inherent good makes him or her an extremely effective agent of the broader process of financialization. At the bottom, I explore the plight of the abject “at risk” victim (or, for some, villain) of the recent economic meltdown: the (racialized) sub-prime borrower, whose “toxic” debts poisoned the financial system in 2007.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 45