Financialization, finance rationality and the role of media in Australia

This article aims to contribute to understanding the role of media in financial ization, understood as the composite of practices involved in making finance central to present-day capitalism and everyday life. To focus on financialization is to consider how it has come to be that the sovereignty of national governments has been eroded by their embedding within a globalized financial environment where financial markets and credit-rating agencies are able to shape the policy preferences and capacities of elected governments, and where the profitable operation of finance markets has become a predominant measure of value. One neglected part of understanding this development is tracing how populations have been equipped with a finance rationality that makes the ethos and affiliations of finance culture into so much 'common sense', thereby transforming existing and possible relations of mutuality. This task is undertaken with examples from archival Australian television programming.