New Zealand Country Study Guide Book

"Financialization would remove the bar between the two terms [micro and macroeconomics] making global movements of finance intimate with daily life."

That is Randy Martin's mordant conclusion, which, although tempered with good insights into late capitalism, is overall bleak and gray in tone.

He has a nice recontextualization of economics terms, micro and macro. He writes they are usually thought of as personal and national, but they can be more accurately thought of as (microeconomic) process and (macroeconomic) structure.

He talks about securitization of the labor market (Shiller) and reputations (David Bowie offering bonds on his future output), and about Jeff Gates' communitarian ownership solution. If you are confused about these terms, understand that they are financial metaphors which have colonized the spaces normally reserved for person considerations.

He says financialization, like globalization but more personal, has effected four main areas of human life: our perceptions of history, of geography, of self, and of time passing.

Martin's book is bleak and communistic, a visit to a kind of vacuous intellectual Leninism which will never die, so long as dissatisfaction is on earth.

His conclusion:

Wealth brings discontentment.

But I should rather suppose that Randy Martin is viewing the world through discontented eyeglasses.