Les fonds communs de placement canadiens et l’émergence d’une finance de masse

Abstract

The rapid growth of Canadian mutual funds entails socio-economic transformations related to 1) the allocation of savings, and 2) the social diffusion of investment. This paper discusses the nature of these two changes, and contributes to their economical and sociological conceptualisation from a “financialisation analysis” perspective. First, mutual funds provoke a shift in savings, from bonds and bank deposits to more active investments - namely in stocks. Second, due to the commodification of mutual funds, new categories of investors enter financial markets; these new actors therefore modify the social diffusion of investment at a more general level. Observers generally understand such changes as either a step in the democratization of finance, or as a reformulation of the capital/labour antagonism. In this paper, we argue that the dynamics of change in Canadian mutual funds should be interpreted, instead, as a massification process.

Keywords

• mutual funds
• savings
• financialisation
• mass
• elites