Quantitative easing (QE) has been a favourite tool of central banks in their post-financial crisis monetary policy apparatus. Social science literature has interpreted QE as a shift away from performative governance characterising pre-crisis monetary policy. With reference to the Bank of England’s experience, I offer a reinterpretation of QE as a performative intervention in the conditions of financial markets, as an attempt to alter the state of financial markets away from dysfunctionality and towards efficiency. I claim that, following the financial crisis, the model of complete and efficient markets – a mainstay in central banking prior to the crisis – was transformed from a real-world approximation to a ‘performative object’ to be achieved. In deploying the balance sheet, central banks attempt to performatively enact complete and efficient markets. The article rejects the claim of discontinuity between pre-crisis and post-crisis monetary policy, arguing that QE is a continuation of inflation targeting though with important innovations. While pre-crisis performativity relied on central bankers’ communicative framing of market expectations, QE is performative via the ontological shaping of financial markets, driven by epistemic models. The article relies on a set of 51 interviews with central bankers and financial market participants and a corpus of documents.

This article explores the puzzling ups and downs of Tesla, going through one the most volatile stock market swings of the recent past, under conditions of financialised capitalism. We adopt a conjunctural approach, highlighting both the macro and micro dynamics shaping the firm’s financial market trajectory. Among these, meticulously maintained narratives, boosted by social media, attracted dedicated followers, while the rise of new retail trading platforms and excitement around Tesla’s index inclusion helped in producing its stock ‘mementum’. This volatility was further supported by an exceptionally large volume of financial derivatives trading, paralleling a public battle between short sellers and the company’s defenders. The resulting stock market boom enabled Tesla to stabilise its finances, whilst its ‘mercurial’ CEO Elon Musk negotiated the largest executive compensation package in US corporate history, turning him into the world’s richest individual. In conclusion, we argue that Tesla serves as an emblematic case of an increasingly tech-driven financialised capitalism, which scholars could use as a window to study future conjunctures.

Since the Paris Agreement, interest in decarbonization and sustainable finance has grown rapidly. Within the prevalent derisking regime, investment for decarbonization must come predominantly from the private sector. However, growth in ‘sustainable finance’ assets is not necessarily causing more sustainability-advancing productive investment to drive the green transition. We thus argue that sustainable finance is not exclusively about investing or providing finance, but crucially also about changing corporate practices toward greater sustainability. To shed light on how private financial actors can influence sustainability in a derisking context and to facilitate this broader research perspective on sustainable finance, we introduce the conceptual framework of ‘channels of influence’. These channels are different strategies and mechanisms used by private actors that influence the behavior of financial and non-financial corporations to increase financial flows to sustainable productive investments. We identify ten channels of influence concerning sustainable finance: (1) initial financing; (2) refinancing; (3) (re)insurance; (4) ratings; (5) climate-litigation; (6) company engagement; (7) divestment; (8) reputation; (9) coalition-building; and (10) standard-setting. These are grouped according to the specificity and breadth of their sustainability impact. Using these channels enables private actors to advance sustainability within the status quo of state-market relations and regulation.

Financial institutions spanning Global North and South are increasingly adopting an agenda of ‘women’s financial inclusion’. The women’s inclusion agenda in finance reflects dynamics of deep marketization that prescribe common economic policy solutions, transcending formerly significant distinctions of geography and social context. In this case, the closing of gender gaps is the universally proscribed policy. Yet this agenda elicits vastly different practices in ‘high’ finance registers where women are recruited as professionals, and microfinance registers where women are incorporated as borrowers. Relating multisited ethnographic materials from a US gender diversity organization and microfinance institutions in India, we ask: on what terms does inclusion take place? First, we examine how gender is constructed across finance institutions by essentializing women as virtuous. These constructions play out according to context-specific gender politics on questions of women’s economic empowerment – concerning neoliberal iterations of feminism in the US case, and financialization of social reproduction in India. Second, what do women’s everyday engagements with the inclusion agenda indicate about the terms of financial inclusion? Women contend with characterizations of themselves as risk-averse professionals and responsible borrowers, respectively, with ambivalence. Their contextually located ambivalent responses are points of both leverage and critique for the financial inclusion agenda.

Enamoured by gamified FinTech platforms and the rise of investment cultures on social media, young people are turning to financial markets to take control over their future in a present shaped by instability and crisis. Recently, the story of young investors has been dominated by sensationalist accounts of speculative investing (i.e., GameStop). But alongside these speculative traders exists the young passive investor, who steadily invests in safe, diverse assets to grow their wealth over their lifetime. The figure of the passive young investor points to a larger social phenomenon of a maturing asset economy where major assets such as property are out of reach, but financial assets have emerged to allow young people to live an assetised life. To understand why young investors are turning to financial markets as an instrument of wealth accumulation, I argue that these practices emerge as a response to young people’s affective state of precariousness. This precariousness emerges from their material and discursive context that includes a retreating welfare state, wage stagnation, limited employment pathways, and individualised risk management. This affective atmosphere of precariousness pushes young people to seek stability and security wherever they can, and for young investors, this is found in financial assets.

Venture capital (VC) has recently emerged as a powerful new actor in the military domain. In the USA, VC investment in defence startups doubled between 2019 and 2022. A similar trend is noticeable in Europe, where billions are funnelled into AI-drone startup companies, spurred by escalating conflicts around the globe. VC investment is a ‘high-risk-high-reward’ way of financing military technologies, which requires fast-paced exponential growth at scale (‘blitzscaling’) and the disruption of existing markets. But with disruption comes debris. What happens when military organisations, which must navigate ethical questions pertaining to life and death, become shaped in the image of Silicon Valley and VC funding? This paper argues that the VC sector exerts a significant influence not only on military procurement processes but also on the direction of military operations and practices. This, in turn, has potentially significant effects on the communities and stakeholders affected by military operations, including those caught in the crosshairs of VC-backed AI technologies.