Britain’s shift towards financial capitalism: how financialisation is altering individual economic behaviour, paving the way for a new regime of risk-taking-driven growth in the United Kingdom

Britain is one of the world’s most financialised economies, driven by an ever-expanding financial sector increasingly broadening its offer of services aimed at citizens. Although seemingly unintentional, successive UK governments have had a crucial role in deregulating the financial sector. Along with the exponentially growing discourse of self-fulfilment and individual risk-taking in a broader context of the retreat of the welfare state, financial services are at the epicentre of the British economy’s driving forces, but what are the implications of this for citizens? Through a comparative quantitative empirical analysis methodology, this paper posits that financialisation has led the way to increased labour casualisation and lesser confidence in the current shareholder value maximisation-driven growth regime.