This is not a book about the workings of the financial sector as such, in terms of the operations of derivatives markets, the antics of investment bankers or the economic terrorism of deregulated global financial flows. This book is about the way the financial sector influences and transforms culture and social life beyond its formal borders, and, more unnervingly, the way it (and the broader capitalist order of which it is a part) depends on that very transformation.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 31