The age of austerity dawned as a moment of neoliberalism without apology. Citing only the voracious demands of the market as the highest government obligation, a grim unanimity emerged among world leaders that put the famous “Washington Consensus” to shame: social spending would be dramatically slashed in order to provide bailouts to banks and other financial corporations and to pay for highly targeted and temporary economic “stimulus” measures that largely amounted to handouts and tax cuts for corporate interests. The triumphalism that had announced the ascendency of markets in the early 1990s, emblematized by Francis Fukayama’s (1993) celebratory pronouncement of the End of History, was over. Instead of a rhetoric of a “rising tide lifting all boats,” austerity is marked by a post-ideological candour, emerging from politicians both left and right: expect only precariousness, now and forever.

Financialization, then, drives and benefits from both precariousness and is presented as its purported antidote. On the one hand, hypercompetitive financial markets, hell-bent on ever-higher returns, have a tremendous disciplinary power [...] Meanwhile, market pressures to privatize, deregulate and otherwise dismantle the social welfare of the state have created conditions in which social life is rendered more precarious than ever, with access to old-age security, healthcare, education, disability benefits and other forms of insurance increasingly left up to individuals and their lonely financial accumen. In the atmosphere of precariousness, the market then offers itself as the solution. Respond to precarious employment by “investing in yourself”: [...] Financialization both drives precariousness and offers itself as its solution.

Indeed, the dominant cultural politics and economics of financialization rely on and promote the idea of leveraging precariousness. Individuals are beholden to comprehend and maximize returns on the risks they bear, transforming the vicissitudes of neoliberal biopolitics into opportunities for individual competition and uplift. In the dawning age of austerity, precariousness is not only the norm; it is a gift, an opportunity for the financialized subject. With great risk comes the possibility of great reward, and those who fail to leverage their personal “risk portfolio” into economic wealth (and an escape from existential and economic precariousness) have only themselves to blame [...]

The Street relies on a constant stream of young hopefuls who have “invested” hundreds of thousands of dollars in an elite education so as to be “job ready” when recruited (42–67). Typically in their early twenties when hired, new investment bankers and traders are ushered into a culture of hyper-individualist competition that requires not loyalty to the company, but the desire to sacrifice one’s life for the pursuit of money. Ho demonstrates that the fundamental insecurity and overwork germane to financial occupations are taken by bankers as evidence of their intellectual and moral superiority and their intimacy with and knowledge of the market (2009, 67–72). This gives rise, however, to what Ho calls “a strategy of no strategy” at both the personal and the corporate level: a fixation on short-term gains, on the quantity of deals made, which has practically no longterm vision or plan and which is, broadly speaking, highly inefficient (firms routinely fire whole departments based on a failure to improve on quarterly earnings, only to find the sector in question booming a few months later) (2009, 277). The system hurtles forward, with investment fads, risky ventures and speculative bubbles forming as each banker, in spite of their individual prescience and insight into the possibility of market collapse, constantly seeks to accelerate their deal-making before the inevitable mental breakdown or systematic crash (see also Hayward 2014).

Ho’s central argument is that the institutional culture of Wall Street, based on the uncut neoliberal values of performance, flexibility, individualism, competition and risk management, is then downloaded by finance onto other firms in manufacturing, retail and service (and, indeed, onto governments) over which it has sway (2009, 4–13). Investment bankers are encouraged to see themselves as capitalism personified, and their culture of self-congratulation is supported by reference to the laziness, stagnancy and lack of ambition assumed to be the norm in other sectors of the economy. As a result, bankers feel they are doing society a service by encouraging nonfinancial firms to downsize and work leaner, forcing on the wider economy the dynamism, market-responsiveness and efficiency on which they pride themselves. Here Wall Street’s institutional culture takes on a viral characteristic, infecting and recoding a huge range of social and economic institutions with its own values and practices. I shall, in Chapter 5, have occasion to suggest that, in their capacity to evangelize their fundamental faith in markets at the point of a proverbial sword, financiers imagine themselves as angels of creative destruction.

It is no surprise, then, that financiers are held up as the ideal workers of the new precarious global economy (Preda 2005). They appear not to suffer from precarity, but to leverage it to their maximal advantage. They invest their time and money (or take on debt) in their own human capital and gain an elite education, then leverage their subject positions to form a mutually beneficial temporary relationship (not an occupation) with a financial corporation. This corporation is not seen as a paternal employer, but as a financier writ large – the individual financier and the firm exist in a relationship of mutual exploitation, and the financier embraces this as evidence of his or her own worth (Crosthwaite 2010). As such, he or she is not only willing but eager to actively play the labour market, embracing precariousness to make quick moves between employers, seeking to advance his or her career and make more money. This ambition is matched by a willingness both to live in the moment, making quick deals and forming tenuous bonds (networks), and to privatize the future by taking on all the costs of health, old age and other forms of insurance (see Holmes 2007). For these “workers” (who rarely even see themselves as workers) traditional corporate structures and government strictures are viewed as rigid and “slow” institutional constraints, anathema to a culture of overwork, swiftness, cleverness, ambition and competitive individualism.

In the financier, we find the paragon of leveraged precariousness, the ideal to which all workers, no matter how humble, are instructed to aspire. They lead a form of life that strives towards maximum liquidity: one that has few durable bonds and is highly adaptable to profitable circumstances, able to respond with almost inhuman alacrity to the needs of the market. [...] Many take the “work ethic,” ethos and connections they cultivated in the financial realm into private and public management of non-financial firms and government bureaucracies, imposing their austere expectations on other workplaces and sectors. While it might be tempting to imagine that these immaterial workers transcend the body itself, such an approach would be misleading: not only do the pace and form of work take their toll on the body, but those whose bodies are marked by gender, race or ability find it challenging to persist and succeed in an informal macho corporate culture based in many ways on whom you know and what you do in your precious “down time” [...]

[...] Just as the myths of the “golden age” occlude the very real precariousness that capitalism imposed upon everyone except a select few in the post-war period, so, too, do narratives that stress post-Bretton Woods finance as out of control and corrupted mask or sideline the tremendous corrosive power it has always wielded (Lapavitsas 2013; Luxemburg 2003). As Ian Baucom (2005) illustrates in his fascinating study of finance in the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, financialization has long been a means to strip individuals and groups of their humanity. Quantitative and speculative techniques have consistently been employed to facilitate amoral and short-sighted processes, and to spread the liability, risk and culpability of such acts across a broad cross section of society (see LiPuma and Lee 2004). The Bretton Woods era saw the mobilization of finance towards neocolonialism, and the vast expansion of consumerism and industrial growth that is today manifesting as a massive ecological crisis (see Foster, Clark and York 2010; Ndikumana and Boyce 2011). While there is much that is new and dangerous about today’s financial economy (notably its global, computerized character, its incredible speed and chaos, and its tremendous power over all aspects of the economy), we should not make the mistake of either (a) imagining that what came immediately before was inherently “better,” or (b) that the problem is simply “finance” or “financialization.” The problem is, and has always been, capitalism, of which finance is one key articulation and mediation. Certainly there have been and yet could be less violent forms of capitalism, at least for certain populations. But this does not justify limiting our theoretical, political or ethical horizons to the reregulation of the financial sector.

[...] Those aspiring to find work are now forced to borrow in order to cultivate knowledges, skills and competencies that save their future employers time and money: where an electrician, a fashion model or a security guard might have once been trained on the job at their employer’s expense, today they must purchase credentials and qualifications. Further, the experience of entering the workforce already in debt and fearing the grave economic consequences (not merely the higher interest rate) of failure to make payments makes for more compliant workers, fearful of losing their jobs. The so-called “developed” economies of the world are largely kept afloat by the willingness of populations to go further and further into personal debt in ways that allow retail sales, housing prices and other economic indicators to increase year over year. But, more profoundly, after 40 years of declining real wages in America, and with the rise of increasingly precarious and low-paying work, debt is a critical means by which people manage to continue to survive and participate in an increasingly consumer-driven society (McNally, 106–107). Where more and more aspects of life are commodified, debt becomes a means of survival (Ross 2014). At the very least, access to credit helps cover the (increasingly frequent) times between jobs; at worst, it supplements insufficient incomes. Soederberg (2014) has called this a system of “debtfare,” where access to sub-prime credit has largely replaced the now diminished welfare state.

Though at opposite ends of a spectrum, both the Wall Street financier and the sub-prime borrower are subjects and objects of an economic idiom at once beyond their control and driven by their actions. Both are trapped, though one in a more gilded cage. In short, both have seen their own social reproduction become dependent on the capacity to which they, in their unique and specific ways, reproduce financialized capitalism. While corporatized media outlets have been quick to castigate sub-prime borrowers for “living beyond their means” and for taking advantage of the system, they hold very little power. And, while some media outlets have blamed financiers for the 2008 crash, it is clear that a much more profound and problematic system of social and economic relations is at play than can be accounted for merely by recourse to narratives of individual greed or corruption.

A similar argument is made by Giorgio Agamben (1998) in his consideration of what he calls “bare life.” For Agamben, modern political systems and imaginaries are underscored by the capacity to strip individuals and groups of all social belonging and value and reduce them to a purely biological existence. Not only is this spectre of raw humanity a threat (“do what we say or else you too will be denuded”), it is also an image and a reality that reaffirm our (those of us fortunate enough not to be reduced to bare life) sense of worth and belonging to our imagined political community. Agamben (2005) traces the way modern political systems have always incorporated zones of exclusion, special laws, spaces or forms of status that maintain bare life within the body politic: refugee camps, emergency laws, apartheid, differential forms of citizenship, or simply abject poverty (see also Tyler 2013). These internalized exclusions reify and justify the idea of the state as a legitimate political community, and allow those who are held to “belong” to reaffirm their own value by contrast. Bare life is the subject of a nauseated disgust and abjection. We fail to sympathize with the beggar, the refugee or the excluded “other” because to do so would call into question our own fabricated sense of value. In other words, modern political systems, in order to justify their own legitimacy as providers of security and peace, by necessity create spectacles of utter precariousness, what Agamben (1998) calls Homo Sacer, “sacred” figures who are afforded no protections from the slings and arrows of the world and the predations of their fellow human beings. The figure of bare life, then, helps us justify our sense of security and belonging, but it also reveals a deeper, unsettling truth: it is all a social construction; at base, we are all reducible to bare life; and, to an even deeper extent, our sense of security and belonging is predicated on the abjection of others. Thus, the abject precarious figure becomes an object of spite and hatred, a cruel and necessary reminder of universality that demands we constantly do the work of justifying why “we” are not “them.”

Aside from postmodern malaise, what might such an approach offer to our considerations of precariousness and financialization? Its most important lesson is that precariousness is the norm, not the exception. Our current precarious moment, one dominated by market and financial forces and manifesting itself as a violent form of hyper-neoliberal austerity (which is producing ever more and deeper economic precariousness), is only one particularly pernicious manifestation of an underlying ontological condition. It is worse than many such manifestations precisely because it is so successful in privatizing precariousness through the logic of individualism and competition. We come to blame ourselves, rather than the system, for our precariousness, in part because, unlike some rigid caste-based system or a slave society, we are (most of us) legally and technically free to escape precariousness (though, ironically, to escape by embracing precarity, by leveraging ourselves into prosperity). It is a system that works by promising that we can, each of us, alone, escape our existential condition of precariousness by getting rich, by obeying the system’s axiomatic dictates and playing our role. The constant barrage of images and tales of the lifestyles of the rich and famous, of celebrities and of others who have “made it” do not exist (as they did in a previous era) to show us the right social order and the natural superiority of certain sorts of people. Rather, these ubiquitous dream images promise each of us a life without precariousness or, more accurately (if we return to the cinematic depictions of the Wall Street predator) a life where precariousness is mastered and leveraged.