ABSTRACT
Financialization is one of those terms that came in the 1990s with a rush of popularity. Like its precursor, globalization, it describes something palpable in the world about the nature of economic and social change and the spread of financial practices, but it is a term without an agreed general meaning. Marx's writing is rich in its engagement with money and finance, and they are integral to his examination of the contradictions of capitalism and crisis. Finance not only carries the ambiguities of money, but itself is integral to circuit of capitalist reproduction, and hence to breaks in that circuit. Following the end of the post-war Bretton Woods Agreement and associated floating of currencies and increasing international financial mobility, many measures of financial activity, both by market value and by turnover, started increasing rapidly. Shareholder value refers to the influence placed by shareholders on corporate managers, pressing them to cut corners and invest shorter-term in order to get high profits.
