The Financialization of the Economy

 

I was in line for coffee at Peets. Six bucks for something that used to cost pocket change. 

The guy in front of me was working an investment app like he was playing a slot machine. And, on the surface, it almost seemed normal. Not just the price of the coffee, but the vibe: Everything’s an asset now. Your house, your retirement, your side hustle, your attention span.

Finance stopped being a support system for the economy and quietly became the main character. Instead of helping businesses make things, it increasingly makes money from money. And it’s very good at it.

Corporations used to talk about building products, expanding operations, hiring people. Now they talk about “maximizing shareholder value” like it’s a sacred chant. Which often translates into stock buybacks, cost-cutting, and a kind of corporate calorie restriction: trim the workforce, boost the share price, repeat. It’s like running a restaurant where you slowly replace the food with accounting tricks but still expect five-star reviews.

To be fair, the system rewards this behavior. Executives are paid in stock. Investors want quick returns. Markets react to quarterly earnings like toddlers on sugar. So companies optimize for that. You don’t need a conspiracy when incentives are this loud.

Meanwhile, regular people are pulled into the same orbit. Retirement used to mean pensions. Predictable, boring, almost comforting. Now it’s 401(k)s, index funds, and a vague sense that you should probably know what the S&P 500 did today. We’ve all been conscripted into being part-time financiers, whether we signed up or not. It’s like being told you’re now responsible for flying the plane mid-flight, but don’t worry, there’s a YouTube tutorial.

There’s also this strange side effect where everything starts to look like a trade. Housing isn’t just shelter; it’s an investment vehicle. Education isn’t just learning; it’s ROI. Even companies that clearly make physical things behave like hedge funds with a side gig in manufacturing. The real economy, the one with stuff you can touch, starts to feel like a supporting actor in its own story.

And then there’s inequality, which shows up like an uninvited guest who refuses to leave. When profits flow more toward financial channels than wages, the gains tend to concentrate. If you own assets, great. If you don’t, you’re mostly watching the scoreboard from the sidelines. It’s not exactly subtle.

It isn’t just the imbalance, it’s the way it reshapes how we think. There’s a quiet cultural shift where everything becomes a calculation. Is this worth my time? My energy? My “personal brand”? We start to sound like spreadsheets with opinions. Even creativity gets nudged into metrics -- views, clicks, monetization -- as if its main job is to justify its own existence in dollars.

I get the appeal. Finance is efficient. It’s scalable. It promises control in a world that feels increasingly chaotic. But it’s also a bit like using a chainsaw to butter toast. Impressive, sure, but maybe not the right tool for everything.

I don’t think the answer is to romanticize some pre-finance golden age, that ship sailed a while ago (probably leveraged and sold in tranches). But it does seem worth asking whether we’ve let the logic of finance seep too far into places it doesn’t belong. Not everything needs to be optimized, traded, or turned into a yield.

Sometimes a house should just be a house. A job should just be a job. And coffee, expensive or not, shouldn’t feel like a symptom of a system that’s constantly trying to turn your morning into a market opportunity.

Or maybe that’s just me, standing in line, watching someone refresh a stock app while the barista mispronounces my name.

Mocking Bird

 

Imposter Syndrome

Whispers of doubt, like a chilling breeze,

Creep into my mind with unsettling ease.

The mockingbird perches, its song a jeer,

Mocking my efforts, igniting fear.

"Who are you to wield the writer's quill?

Your words mere echoes, lacking skill."

Ignoring the taunts of that mocking bird,

I defy my doubts with every word.

Style Meets the Algorithm

I’ve got a habit. 

Not a dangerous one (no one’s staging interventions), but a stylistic tic … a little rhetorical pivot that walks in one direction, stops, and then sharply turns on its heel. You know, the tried and true: "Not this. That." Such as "That’s not about success. That’s about keeping up appearances."

I call it “the correction.” Professors call it “contrast negation.” Whatever it's proper name is, I’ve always liked how it landed. It’s clean. It snaps. It gives a piece a kind of rhythm and makes a point without having to raise its voice. For years, I've used it the way I use garlic: generously, and probably more often than necessary.

Lately, though, I’ve been told this little move of mine is ]]dramatic pause[[ suspicious.

Apparently, if you see a line like “That’s not about winning. That’s about not losing,” you’re supposed to squint at it like a detective in a low-budget crime show and mutter, “AI wrote this.”

Which is funny, because I can dig up blog posts I wrote five or six years ago (back when AI was still mostly a sci-fi punchline) and there it is: “That’s not about confidence. That’s about fear wearing better clothes.” Right there in black and white, no algorithm in sight.

So I guess I have two explanations to chose from: Either I was secretly channeling the future like some kind of accidental oracle, or (and this feels slightly more plausible) AI learned that move from writers like me who were already using it.

But we’ve decided, collectively, that the fingerprint belongs to the machine, not the human who taught it how to hold the pen. So, we’re starting to treat patterns like they’re crimes. As if any repeatable rhythm in language must have been mass-produced in a server farm somewhere. It’s like accusing a pianist of cheating because they used the same chord progression twice. No, that’s not automation. That’s style. (Oooops! There I go again.)

Or maybe it’s just habit. Writers, like everyone else, fall into grooves. We find shapes that work and we reuse them. Not because we’re lazy, but because language is a tool and when you find a grip that fits your hand, you don’t immediately throw it away just to prove you’re original.

What’s strange is how quickly we’ve flipped the script. The things that used to signal craft — clarity, rhythm, structure — things you’ve been doing for years get rebranded as artificial. (Damn, now I've used an em-dash, another AI "tell")

There’s something mildly absurd about being told your natural writing voice now sounds like a bot, as if you’ve been unknowingly cosplaying as software this whole time. But it also nudges at a bigger question: if a machine can replicate the patterns we rely on, were those patterns ever as uniquely ours as we thought? Or were they just well-worn paths we all happened to walk?

I don’t have a neat answer. I’m still going to use “the correction” when it earns its keep. It still works. It still lands. I’m just a little more aware now that what once felt like a signature move might actually be a shared accent … and one that’s been picked up, polished, and redistributed at such a scale that it's now it's an AI tell.

Which, depending on your mood, is either fascinating or irritating.

Not a crisis. Just a shift. (See? Just can’t help myself.)

 _________________________

Follow Up 

Barron's has just published a piece on AlphaSense's library of corporate documents, earnings call transcripts, SEC filings, and press releases. It indicates  that a single-sentence construction has exploded across corporate America since 2024. The pattern is "It's not just X, it's Y."

Hmmmmm … now I have to consider leaving this tool out of my “go tos” ‘cause AI has made it so ubiquitous that it’s making my writing sound like everybody else’s.

Oh, well.

A meaningless number ... but I like it.

 

Last week, 3 of my LinkedIn posts got a combined 357,983 impressions.

Vanity metrics. Everybody pretends to despise them while secretly refreshing dashboards like gamblers rubbing lottery tickets under a gas station light. Followers. Likes. Views. Open rates. Reach. A whole spreadsheet ecosystem built to quantify human attention, which is already one of the flakiest substances on earth.

I know most of those “impressions” meant nothing. A half-second glance. A distracted scroll. Somebody opening LinkedIn by accident while trying to check the weather. The internet counts all of it like an overenthusiastic carnival worker.

And even though I know this, I’m not above it. 

Not even close.

A big number activates my ancient monkey brain. I saw big numbers on 3 posts, added them up to 357,983 and briefly felt like a medieval peasant who’d been invited to sit near the king.

Meaningless? Absolutely.

Distracting? Unfortunately, yes.

Fun? Can't pretend it wasn't.