ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a bank's efforts to persuade well-to-do French farmers to go beyond their traditionally materialist views of economic life, and to diversify their 'patrimoine' into financial instruments. At one of the bleakest moments of the global banking crisis, the commentator Martin Wolf wrote: 'Finance is the web of intermediation binding economic agents to one another, across both space and time'. A classic example of different logics comes from Neil Fligstein's research on the financialisation of US corporations. Fligstein identified what he called 'the finance conception of the modern corporation', which was driven by managers' desire for growth in a context in which takeovers of direct competitors were restricted by antitrust laws. Finance has, of course, expanded markedly as well as changed its nature. In the US, for example, financial services grew from 2.8 percent of GDP in 1950 to 8.3 percent in 2006.
