ESSAY. Financialization as Imaginary: Between Artificial Prolongation and Inevitable Chaos

This article is a draft inspired by the stock market and oil.

Bruno Bertez

13 Juillet

Financialization as Imaginary: Between Artificial Prolongation and Inevitable Chaos

The financialization of the world, imposed and steered by the United States for several decades, cannot be reduced to a mere expansion of financial markets.

It represents a profound transformation of economic relations: a shift from a world of values rooted in real production, labor, and concrete utility to a universe of values expressed in paper dollars, traded on ad hoc markets.

The implicit objective of this transformation has been to free itself, as much as possible, from the fundamental laws of productive economics — labor value, use value, and exchanges based on real needs — and to replace them with subjective, self-referential relationships controllable by financial discourse.

This essay proposes to analyze and explore this process through the concept of economic imaginary, to examine its functioning via the historical example of the USSR and its application to the contemporary Western system, and to draw avenues for reflection on the future.

1. The Economic Imaginary: Definition and Conditions of Sustainability

An economic imaginary can be defined as a coherent set of signs, narratives, theories, beliefs, and practices that gradually rigidify into codes, institutions, and structures.It produces and organizes monetary valuations, but also social hierarchies, moral principles, and the collective perception of what is “valuable.”As emphasized by Austrian school economists, particularly Ludwig von Mises, economic values are not objective properties of things. They arise from subjective judgments made by individuals.A system of values is therefore fundamentally imaginary and subjective.However, no imaginary can sustain itself durably unless it is continuously nourished by reality. It requires energy from the physical world: the concrete production of goods and services, the extraction of material resources, and the satisfaction of genuine human needs.When this nourishment weakens or when the gap between imaginary valuations and physical reality becomes too wide, the system loses coherence and becomes vulnerable to collapse.

2. The Collapse of the USSR: The Textbook Case of Disconnection

The Soviet Union provides the clearest illustration of this mechanism. Its value system rested on a powerful ideological imaginary: central planning, the valorization of collective labor, the primacy of heavy industry, and the belief in the superiority of socialism.As long as this imaginary received minimal energy from reality (steel production, armaments, basic necessities), it could be maintained. But from the 1970s–1980s onward, the gap widened dramatically: administered prices no longer reflected real scarcities, production incentives collapsed, and structural shortages multiplied.In 1991, the Soviet imaginary disintegrated within months.Monetary values, social hierarchies, collective beliefs, and the system’s promises collapsed simultaneously. Society then urgently reverted to fundamental use values and primary exchanges (barter, parallel markets, local self-sufficiency).The collapse was not merely economic: it was the bankruptcy of an imaginary no longer nourished by reality.

3. The Contemporary Western System: A Colossal Dollar-Centered Imaginary

Today’s dominant system presents an analogous but infinitely more sophisticated and globalized structure. It is a massive economic imaginary centered on the dollar and sustained by intensive financialization.In this imaginary:

• Values (asset prices, interest rates, corporate valuations, sovereign debts) are largely produced by dollarized financial markets.
• These markets increasingly function as “paper markets”: paper oil, paper gold, stocks, debts, and future promises traded through derivatives (futures, options, swaps).

It is important to distinguish two coexisting but increasingly divergent realities:

• The physical dollar, anchored in real exchanges of goods and services.
• The paper dollar, created and multiplied through financial circuits and central bank balance sheets.

The oil market offers a particularly revealing example. Global physical production and consumption represent approximately 100 million barrels per day. On derivatives markets, the daily volume of transactions reaches several billion barrel equivalents.This leverage — sometimes on the order of 50 to 1 — makes it possible to strongly influence prices, steer expectations, and shape collective perceptions far beyond real physical supply and demand.Through these mechanisms — abundant money creation and manipulation of paper markets — the system can artificially prolong valuations that are increasingly detached from productive reality. It thus delays confrontation with physical constraints (resources, energy, climate, demography) and widens the gap between the imaginary and the real.

4. The Fundamental Law: Every Imaginary Eventually Collides with Reality

History shows that the energy sustaining a value system does not come from trading screens, central bank balance sheets, or institutional discourse. In the final analysis, it comes from the physical world: human labor applied to matter, extracted energy, and goods actually produced and consumed.When the gap between the imaginary (paper valuations, infinite promises, financial perceptions) and reality becomes too vast, the system can no longer be maintained by monetary or regulatory artifices. It fractures. It shatters. We move from the imagined and imaginary order to chaos.The collapse of the USSR was a brutal example. The current Western system, despite its power and its ability to export its contradictions, is not exempt from this structural dynamic.Avenues for Reflection on the FutureFinancialization has not merely altered financial instruments: it has attempted to change the very nature of value. By substituting a dollar-centered imaginary for objective relationships with production and resources, it has bought time — but at the cost of progressively widening the fracture.For the decades ahead, several questions arise with urgency:

• To what extent can a system continue to artificially prolong an imaginary disconnected from reality without triggering a major systemic crisis?
• What role will war, violence, and their destructive effects play in the evolution, duration, and transformation of the system?
• What forms might a re-anchoring of economic values in physical reality (energy, raw materials, industrial production, territorial resilience) take?
• In an increasingly multipolar world, can alternative imaginaries — carried by other powers or regional initiatives — emerge and stabilize sustainably?
• How can monetary and financial institutions be rethought so they once again serve as a bridge between the imaginary and the real, rather than as tools of artificial prolongation?

The essential lesson of this exploratory analysis is clear: no economic imaginary, however sophisticated, can indefinitely replace the physical world. Sooner or later, reality reasserts its rights.The quality of our collective reflection on this tension will, to a large extent, determine the nature of the transitions to come.If this reflection does not occur, it is from Chaos that the New Order will emerge.

Note: In this essay, we speak of two dollars — a real dollar and an imaginary dollar.

This is a simplification for the purposes of the argument.

The reality is far more complex, and several conceptual dollars can be identified:

a financial dollar versus a commodities/goods-and-services dollar (the former ultimately destined to be devalued against the latter), and

a domestic dollar versus an international dollar (the international one destined to be devalued relative to the domestic one).