The Financial Times advertises the new Zeitgeist: ‘We live in financial times.’ Earlier, Heinrich Heine, the German poet, also identified the change: ‘Money is the God of our time.’1 In the later half of the twentieth century individuals became true believers.
Human history is a sequence of ‘ations’ – civilisation, industrialisation, urbanisation, globalisation; interspersed with actual or threatened annihilation (war, genocide or the mutually assured destruction (MAD) pact of the Cold War). The most recent ‘ation’ is financialisation – the conversion of everything into monetary form (known as another ‘ation’ – monetisation). Increasing wealth, ...
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