A critique of financial neoliberalism: a perspective combining multidisciplinary methods and commodity markets

Abstract

AbstractThe era of financialization bas been marked by a huge increase in the size of the financial sector. The economic justifications for this expansion arise from the prevailing neo-liberal ideology; they are based on arguments like leading role of markets, economic efficiency, reallocation and spreading of risk. Given these reasons, financialization can be viewed as a form of neoliberalism and then we can use the term financial neoliberalism (Palley in Financialization: the economics of finance capital domination. Springer, 2016) to denote it. This commentary paper hopes to complement this view by highlighting the usefulness of recent “multidisciplinary” methods (i.e., methods which do not fall within the usual economic discipline). We focus first on the definition of financialization process, second on its implications on the commodity markets, and third and finally on the importance of the role of multidisciplinary methods, applied to these markets, capable of highlighting the contradictions of the neoliberalism framework, in such a way, we hope, to promote further research.