Housing and Water in Light of Financialisation and “Financialisation”

This paper addresses the impact of financialisation on the systems of provision (SoPs) drawing on a series of case studies in housing and water – both non-financial sectors. In order to understand this more fully, the paper first considers some of the theoretical constructs connecting money, commodities and finance, exploring the theories of money, the extension of that theory to finance and the specification of the processes attaching finance to the non-financial. The paper shows that both case-study sectors have increasingly been subject to market forms with, for example, land markets in housing and cost recovery practices in water provision. However there are different forms of monetary relations across the case studies. Simply to equate financialisation with commodification would be misleading. The diversity of arrangements across sectors and locations is addressed in the paper by making the distinction between commodification (production for private profits), the commodity form (periodic payments for a good or service in the absence of a profit motive) and commodity calculation (application of a monetary logic without money changing hands). Each of these is associated with different forms of marketization and “market forces” but they are underpinned by different economic and social structures. The paper then goes on to tie these insights to financialisation and contemporary capitalism more generally with reference to the case studies. For housing there is variegation in the extent to which the expansion of finance coincides with expansion of material provision, as shown with for example the different outcomes from expanding lending for house production as opposed to mortgage lending for consumption. In water, there is diversity in the extent and nature of privatisation and this has led to differences in the extent and depth of financial intervention across the case studies. England and Wales lies at one extreme with heavily entrenched financialisation while this is considerably less significant in the case studies with less privatisation. The final section of this paper considers the implication of the different forms of financialisation for economic and social reproduction including gender.