Expropriation and Risk-Free Accumulation: Inequality in the Age of Finance

• In Event: Risk, Race and Financial Capitalism

Abstract

What might an analysis of capitalism from the perspectives of capitalists, especially those in finance, tells us about the unequal distribution of risk, precarity, and downward mobility? In this presentation, I make the argument that over the past three decades, what fueled the exponential increase of wealth inequality in the US was the growing ability of particular powerful actors to capture, feast on, and unlock the accumulated productive assets embedded in such sites as corporations and houses. (These assets were downsized and redistributed towards the top, thereby reducing the number of people who could lay claim to them). As such, despite global proclamations of how powerful financiers are penultimate “risktakers,” it is perhaps more apt to characterize them as capturing the benefits of the risks that others have borne. In other words, in the past thirty years, capitalists have experienced a sense of “limitless” opportunity in the accumulation of capital, which they were able to access, by and large, risk-free. Such a development showcases the changing nature of how capital is accumulated under financialization. Moreover, it sheds light on how the distinctions between expropriation and exploitation, while seemingly blurring among the relatively marginalized and the hyper-marginalized, are increasingly relevant in explaining the separations between the hyper-wealthy and “the rest”. In other words, financial actors and institutions have literally “taken over” assets (such as corporations) that used to be more widely shared, and in so doing, they have expropriated these assets and thus accumulated this wealth “risk free” while devolving risk to others. How does interrogating the risk-free accumulation among financial capitalists shed light on the nature of racial capitalism today?

Author

• Karen Ho, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities