ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on financial news coverage, financial market databases, an analysis of 312 annual reports from exchanges, and 59 expert interviews conducted with exchanges, brokers and other market participants in London, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore between May 2017 and September 2018. It provides an overview of the existing literature on financialization and exchanges. The chapter analyses the transformation of exchanges from marketplaces to market actors by highlighting how and why they changed through marketization, internationalization and digitization. Capital markets stand at the heart of and are a precondition for most of the phenomena associated with financialization. The chapter demonstrates that, exchanges have both been impacted by financialization themselves and have over time become crucial agents for capital market development and the politics of financialization. Pre-modern forms of exchanges have existed at least since the fourteenth century in Venice, Florence and Genoa.
