Abstract

Households came to participate in the financialization of the economy and society by increasingly relying on all sorts of financial instruments to carry their material and cultural reproduction. Mortgages, student loans, credit cards, consumer loans, insurances, and the like, became part of the everyday life of ordinary citizens, in a way that scholars described as the “democratization of finance” (Erturk, Froud, Johal, Leaver and Williams 2007). This chapter deals with a specific aspect of the financialization of households worldwide: the extension of multiple forms of micro-credits to low-income populations.