Financial Globalization, Social Exclusion and Financial Crisis

This paper suggests one set of mechanisms that ties financial globalization processes to local dynamics of financial inclusion or exclusion. Specifically, this paper explores the worldwide reconsideration of financial firms' strategies that has accompanied financial globalization. It is shown that the neoliberal and asymmetric-information approaches to credit markets and financial crises in developing economies overlook these dimensions of financial globalization because of their tendency to focus on representative credit markets. Banks' strategic shift has led to the global homogenization and stratification of financial practices—and this in turn has been a key driver of processes of financial exclusion. Financial exclusion then involves bifurcation within financial markets, so that different markets serve different portions of the household and business population. This analysis suggests a reconstruction of Minsky's microfoundational model of the origins of financial fragility and crisis, which shifts from Minsky's emphasis on a representative borrower-lender relationship to a situation of borrower-lender relationships in bifurcated markets.