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This text provides an accessible cultural and political analysis of how our disorderly and financialized system of capitalism works, what led to the financial crisis that began in 2007, the policy debates about reform, and why democratic control is difficult after the events of 2008.

In this paper the lobbying efforts of the Dutch financial elite aimed at safeguarding the securitization of Dutch mortgages, which had become a crucial part of Dutch banking business models, is reconstructed, centred on the so-called Liquidity Coverage Ratio of the Basle Committee of Banking Supervision, which dates from January 2013. Section 2 traces the effects of these lobbying efforts. Section 3 describes the storyline used by the Dutch elite to distinguish Dutch securitization ('good') from its US counterpart ('bad'). Section 4 contrasts this storyline with some 'empirical irritants' ('ugly') which raise broader questions about the role of securitization in the crisis, to lead, in section 5 to the straightforward question: who is telling this story and why? The concluding section draws lessons from this case about elite politics in financialized capitalism.

Since the late 1980s, social scientists have argued that advanced economies have undergone a process of financial concentration that is resulting in a growing unevenness of the accessibility of capital. Households, small and medium-sized businesses as well as non-standard economic activities have increasing difficulties in finding funds. There are both sound economic and compelling moral reasons to address this issue. In order to ensure a more equal accessibility of capital, the author proposes a mandatory levy on the surpluses of mainstream pension funds to fund an alternative financial infrastructure as a first step to redressing unevenness. The underlying rationale is that "financial pluralism" is the key to a more even accessibility of capital.

In political theory, descriptive representation as a corrective to structural asymmetries within society is usually debated against the background of formal political institutions. It is discussed in this paper as a means to enhance the declining legitimacy of Dutch works councils as important sites of democratic decision-making in their own right. The aim is to show that the moral requirements of democratic inclusion have to be weighed against the functional requirements of effective representation, concluding that in some cases the costs in terms of effectiveness exceed the gains in terms of inclusiveness. Hence, the debate about descriptive representation is clearly in need of a more contextualized assessment of its pros and cons.