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Date
Time
5:00 pm to 7:00 pm
Venue
SOAS - University of London
Room
DLT – SOAS Main Building

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Nick Bernards, Author of Fictions of Financialization (2025), discusses his new book.

For decades, many people on the left have decried the finance sector as the main culprit for the toxic effects of capitalism. Financialization is commonly invoked to explain everything from growing inequality to the housing crises and the destruction of the environment. Only by confronting finance, so the story goes, can there be any hope for a more sustainable economy.

In this new intervention, Nick Bernards makes the case against the dominance of this story. Arguing that the concept of financialization is ill-understood and overworked, Bernards shows how we risk glossing over the true nature of capitalism when focusing on the mythical powers of finance. The moralistic distinction between harmful 'financial' and more honest 'real' economies leads to an impasse if we want to better understand how exploitation truly manifests.

Rather than indulging in the harmful fantasy that confronting the financial elite will fix the economy, Bernards provides an alternative approach. Starting from the premise that risk and speculation are core to the operation of all capital and not just the hallmark of a perverted financial sector, this Marxist reading of the interconnection between capitalism's uneven exploitation of labour and nature and financial capital lays the groundwork for a much-needed view of the real powers of finance.

Speakers

  • Devika Dutt (King’s College London)
  • Hannah Hasenberger (University of Cambridge)
  • Christian Koutny (University of Hertfordshire)

The event will be chaired by Ezgi B. Unsal (SOAS).

Header image credit: Daniam Chou via Unsplash.

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  • Nick Bernards is Associate Professor of Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick. He is also author of The Global Governance of Precarity (Routledge, 2018), A Critical History of Poverty Finance (Pluto, 2022). 
  • Devika Dutt is a Lecturer in Development Economics at King's College, London. Her research focuses on the political economy of foreign exchange intervention, institutions of global governance, political economy of development policy, and decolonising Economics.
  • Hannah Hasenberger is a Teaching Associate in Economic Geography at the University of Cambridge. Hannah’s research seeks to understand state action and its uneven implications in the broader context of global economic and financial hierarchies and competitive pressures. 
  • Christian Koutny is a Research Fellow at University of Hertfordshire. Christian is a critical political economist working on finance and space. His research examines financialisation of global capital accumulation as well as the specific role of the UK economy within the global political economy.