Ideology is, in Louis Althusser’s (2014) definition, an imagined relationship to real economic conditions. Today’s brand of capitalism demands subjects who identify themselves as miniature financiers, or, as Robin Blackburn (2006) puts it, “two-legged cost-and profit centres.” The study of financialization, then, is not merely the study of how capitalist culture beguiles and charms, nor merely of how it threatens and cajoles. It is the study of how, on the one hand, the economic depends on the cultural and how, on the other, the cultural depends on the economic.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 95