[...] Claustrophobic cultural norms and parochial markets were to be swept away by the free movement of capital around the world, as were inefficient and unfair labour practices and corrupt governments. This rhetoric reached a fevered pitch during the dot.com boom at the turn of the millennium, when our old friend Bill Gates was among those CEOs leading the choir in praise of a borderless digital economy that would sweep away lumbering corporate dinosaurs, open up bold new markets and allow the spirit of the creative entrepreneur latent in each individual to shine through (Gates 1995; 1999). Indeed, so much opportunity was said to abound that individuals who failed to seize it had only themselves to blame, an impression which lent itself to the drive to privatize and to cut social services lest they inhibit such creative zeal. Even meagre forms of economic redistribution, it was feared, would create dependent individuals unwilling to embrace the risks and rewards of the new economy. The appearance of “creativity” as the partner of “destruction” here is no accident, or, more accurately, it is no accident that Schumpeter’s initially pessimistic and academic term became a crucial element in the reproduction of financialization. In much the same way as discourses of innovation, progress, science and ingenuity were applied to the technological development of nuclear bombs, the slippery language of creativity offers an unaccountable rhetoric that both excuses and facilitates financial speculation’s destructive practices towards the reproduction of the ruling paradigm. By linking the vicissitudes of the deregulated free market to the idea of creativity, which is held to be the dynamic and unique element of the human spirit, financialized capitalism’s drives and effects are disguised as the natural and inevitable articulations of human nature itself, rather than as historically contingent and entirely avoidable.