The Financialization of Everyday life or the Domestication of Finance?

Abstract

Scholars applying notions of governmentality and performativity to everyday finance and work on the financialization of daily life suggest that the daily encounter with financial products, credit rating systems and new political and media discourses promoting a financial entrepreneurial spirit lead to the penetration of financial logic into everyday realms that were once free of economic calculation. This article, drawing on interviews with Hungarian mortgage borrowers, looks at how exactly financial products shift everyday subjectivities, by focusing on three key terrains: relationships, time frames and rationality. We argue that albeit mortgages do carry their own specific logics (certain time frames, rationalities and approaches to relationships are required by certain mortgages), these logics hardly ever succeed in shaping everyday subjectivities to their own image. Finance is ‘domesticated’: mortgages are appropriated to existing relationships, temporal structures and rationalities guiding everyday life. New subjectivities emerge and a novel financial logic is applied to everyday life mostly in cases when the take-for-granted course of events breaks down: when mortgages are denied and people face payment difficulties and defaults. In these cases, previous routines of rationality are questioned, relationships are put to (a financial) test and time frames are revaluated according a financial logic.