Finance and NeoLiberalism

This article explores the interactions between neoliberalism and the development of the financial industry as drivers of primary and secondary income inequalities. While the rising inequalities should make neoliberal policies that exacerbate them, politically unsustainable, Finance in the broad sense - financial sector and associated activities, financialization, financial lobbies - comes in support of neoliberalism. Until the fall of Lehman, Finance accompanied the extension of neoliberalism, by the jobs it concentrated in the first converted countries, and by financial innovation, including allowing access to property for most. Since 2008, Finance has assumed the role of the culprit who would impose the prominence of neoliberal reforms, because it would require it either as a creditor of states, or as an intermediary of citizens attached to their pension savings, or, in the case of continental Europe, as a post-brexit industrial opportunity.