> To answer this one must ask "What is financialisation?" The short answer is; a system in which the success or failure of a company is of no relevance to its "value".
Nonsense. Granted, with meme stocks, the price of a stock has been decoupled from any underlying notion of value, which is disconcerting (but driven by retail investors/gamblers, not by traditional investors).
But with Uber and many others, it seems reasonable to assume that the investors expect to recoup their money by (ultimately) earning dividends from Uber's successful operation, which is good old traditional finance.
There are two problems left:
1. It is conceivable that some early investors see that no sustainable profits might be possible, but still fund and develop the venture in order to sell it (at a higher valuation) to less sophisticated investors later (that don't see the limitations of the business model so clearly).
2. It is plausible that the entire business model is predicated on the idea of a predatory monopoly, ie driving out competition first and raising prices second.
Those are massive problems that need to be addressed with aggressive regulation, but they are not a consequence of "financialisation".
> Under that system, Uber is successful so long as the financial market says it is.
"The financial market" cannot just arbitrarily "say" what a company is worth (and definitely not in the long run) - there are just too many players.
Nonsense. Granted, with meme stocks, the price of a stock has been decoupled from any underlying notion of value, which is disconcerting (but driven by retail investors/gamblers, not by traditional investors).
But with Uber and many others, it seems reasonable to assume that the investors expect to recoup their money by (ultimately) earning dividends from Uber's successful operation, which is good old traditional finance.
There are two problems left:
1. It is conceivable that some early investors see that no sustainable profits might be possible, but still fund and develop the venture in order to sell it (at a higher valuation) to less sophisticated investors later (that don't see the limitations of the business model so clearly).
2. It is plausible that the entire business model is predicated on the idea of a predatory monopoly, ie driving out competition first and raising prices second.
Those are massive problems that need to be addressed with aggressive regulation, but they are not a consequence of "financialisation".
> Under that system, Uber is successful so long as the financial market says it is.
"The financial market" cannot just arbitrarily "say" what a company is worth (and definitely not in the long run) - there are just too many players.