What Would It Mean to Democratize Finance? An Evaluation of Divergent Conceptions of Democracy and Finance

Leah Downey and Stefan Eich Calls to “democratize finance” abound today. Yet this apparent consensus obscures sharply divergent conceptions of both democracy and finance. This article maps these demands along two axes, distinguishing between access- and power-based conceptions of democracy, and between three dimensions of finance: payment, capital markets, and banking. We then develop three […]