The World of Risk
Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma
Excerpt Below:
Since the mid-1970s the rapid and unprecedented expansion of speculative capital has produced a new culture of financial circulation that has enormous consequences both for the organization of capital and for the great dispairities in wealth and life possibilities between the metropole and the multipolar periphery. What makes this emerging culture of financial circulation new is not the global flow of capital; earlier centuries also witnessed great movements of money. Its newness does not lie in increased levels of technological sophistication and power, though these of course make it easier to carry out nearly instantaneous worldwide transactions. What rendersthe social relations of financial circulation so historically novel is that they are defined and determined through the quantification and pricing of risk.