Financialisation/Borrowing Circle as a Solution to an Unpleasant Conundrum: Observations from the Mature Neoliberalism in Turkey

The neoliberal economic programme, as being a tendential response to the permanent crisis of capitalism, has been feeding the ground for the process of financialisation. In this environment, financialisation has also been a temporary solution to an inevitable and unpleasant conundrum for the capital. Capital has to depress wages to increase the profit rate on the one hand, and it has to raise the wages to ensure a growing demand for commodities. In contemporary capitalism, the wage shares and wage rates have been depressed. In this framework, financialisation has provided a short-term solution to demand creation. Labouring classes, since their incomes are reduced, are forced to borrow and accumulate debt. This also contributes to the amplification of financialisation tendency. This study aims to find out the extent to which this process has taken place in Turkey. Using a social class based structure, we identify the classes having surplus and deficit at income-consumption balance to detect which are forced to borrow and accumulate debt in Turkey.