In our contribution to this forum, we suggest that critical macro-finance (CMF) scholars and Post Keynesian monetary theorists would profit from a more explicit engagement with each other. Post Keynesian scholars would benefit from the detailed empirical insights that CMF provides, particularly through its analysis of non-bank financial institutions and the conceptual focus on liquidity and liabilities. Meanwhile, the CMF literature would benefit from more explicit grounding in earlier Post Keynesian concepts. In particular, the theory of liquidity preference, the concept of the liquidity premium, and the theory of endogenous money highlight macroeconomic issues missing from CMF scholarship.

This forum contribution critically rethinks the macro-financial approach to liquidity by focusing more explicitly on its public-private hybrid dimension. To do so, it introduces the notion of a ‘liquidity regime’: a heuristic device aimed at tracking the ensemble of social relations and institutions that govern the coherence of the payments system at any given time. A key insight that emerges from this approach is that the ability to make markets and access liquidity is never neutral or apolitical. What requires closer attention, therefore, is precisely how the interaction between public authorities and private market participants affords some actors greater leverage in shaping the financial system.

The global financial crisis is usually seen as a failure of neoclassical economic theory and neoliberal policy, but it also represented an epistemological failure. Forecasters who missed the crisis neglected to include the financial sector in their models, while aggregate indicators such as GDP failed in spite (or perhaps because) of their heavy emphasis on financially driven growth. In contrast to both critics and proponents of GDP who see it as a purely statistical measure, this article argues that GDP is in fact a form of numerical rhetoric. Political messages in such estimates were explicit until the early twentieth century, but have since become implicit in hidden assumptions. To uncover the narratives built-in to GDP's view of finance, the article conducts a thought-experiment comparing GDP with two counterfactual indicators corresponding to historical views of finance as either non-productive or an actual cost to society. The analysis shows how changing this single assumption leads to very different narratives regarding the class-balance of workers vs. capitalists, the relative importance of consumption, and the extent of space that exists for public policy to influence the economy. The article concludes with some thoughts on making the implicit assumptions in GDP explicit, and opening up the debate to the broader public in a transparent way.

This forum contribution addresses two major themes in de Goede's original essay on ‘Financial security’: (1) the relationship between stable markets and the proverbial ‘security dilemma’; and (2) the development of new decision-technologies to address risk in the post-World War II period. Its argument is that the confluence of these two themes through rational choice theory represents a fundamental re-evaluation of the security dilemma and its relationship to the rule of law governing market relations, ushering in an era of perpetual physical and financial insecurity.

Narratives and conventions have received considerable attention in recent discussions of the valuation of financial assets. Narratives and conventions, however, can only be effective to the extent that they attract and persuade audiences, and this article makes the case for paying more attention to those audiences. In particular, the article argues that financial assets can only be established as assets if there is a group of potential investors that has been persuaded to accept them as such: to take them seriously as potential investments. The article coins the term asset circles to refer to such groups and supports the argument with a discussion of venture capital and its role in the production of unicorns: private companies with extraordinary valuations. Venture capital firms may be thought of as value entrepreneurs, and much of the venture capital process is oriented towards constructing both value narratives for the companies they invest in and asset circles prepared to accept those value narratives. Their aim in these processes is a profitable exit, in which the venture capital firm converts its investment back into cash at a considerable profit through either an acquisition or a flotation.

Ayache presents a view of markets and mathematics that attempts to conform to the philosophies of Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux. However, this attempt is unsuccessful because Ayache adopts a view of probability rooted in nineteenth-century conceptions that cannot accommodate the radical uncertainty of the markets. This is unfortunate as it is reasonable to believe that the ideas of Badiou and Meillassoux, when synthesised with contemporary ideas of probability, could offer interesting insights. Roffe presents a better argued synthesis of Deleuze and markets, however he makes similar assumptions about contemporary probability that undermine his conclusions.

The 2008 crisis made clear that credit rating agencies (CRAs) can contribute to systemic financial risk. Surprisingly, post-crisis reforms have hardly addressed the underlying problems, including rating agencies’ methodologies, their ratings’ homogeneity, and widespread market reliance on these signals. Current scholarship on CRA regulation blames policymakers’ unwillingness to fix systemic problems. This article draws on insights from the social studies of finance literature to provide a different explanation: the key obstacle is policymakers’ inability to fix these problems. The regulatory problem stems from performativity: risk assessments (including ratings) shape the risks they purport to merely describe. Adding to this literature, the article spells out how performativity limits credit rating reforms by making sweeping changes potentially harmful. Standardizing methodologies or setting up a public CRA could reinforce ratings’ homogeneity. Replacing ratings in regulation with market-based indicators might create worse systemic problems. The article then empirically details how EU policymakers, confronted with these dilemmas, ultimately steered clear of bold reforms.

This article presents a socio-anthropological analysis of the formation of a business ecosystem around blockchain technology in the Netherlands, within the broader context of the European Union and the digital single market. I argue that while reproducing widespread global models of business group and network formation, the relations created by these networks also reveal particularities of local business and governance cultures. Such particularities emerge from the pragmatics of collaboration and competitive market relationships, as well as legal heterogeneity and plans for legal harmonisation in digital innovation and governance in Europe. They also emerge from the challenges and transformations that current experimentation cultures for digital innovation bring to the interactions between market players, regulators, and government. These challenges and transformations materialise in increasingly informal connections and strategies for experimental legitimisation, which occur in parallel to more formal and traditional forms of regulatory and governmental interaction. The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands and in online terrains, including observation periods and 32 interviews with entrepreneurial project teams, as well as with individuals involved in financial incumbents’ innovation labs.

This article argues that the temporality of the financial economy ought to be seen as radically synchronistic. ‘Synchronism’ refers to both an epistemological and practical approach that addresses finance neither with a view to the past nor to the future, but is instead focused on the moment that a financial transaction is settled (i.e., the horizon of trading). From this perspective, the article expands the scope of current social theorizing on financial markets, which is characterized by a preoccupation with the futurity of financial markets and products. It suggests that financial synchronism can be traced back to certain developments in economic theory since the so-called ‘marginalist revolution’, which enabled the transfer of a certain optics informing market theories into financial practices. On these terms, financial synchronism is interpreted as a powerful social imaginary that crucially mediates the way contemporary societies face the contingency of the future.

A new literature on housing and financialization has emerged in recent years, but scholars have yet to examine how political actors shape national trajectories of housing financialization. In this article, we address this shortcoming by examining the cases of Russia and Poland in the 1990-2018 period. We argue that in both contexts political elites implemented a radical market-oriented reshaping of housing finance. However, by pursuing distinct statecraft strategies and modes of integrating the domestic economy into global markets, Russian and Polish political elites created two divergent trajectories of housing financialization. Russian political elites pursued patrimonial statecraft strategies and a mode of global economic integration based on raw material exports. The Putin administration channeled revenues from raw material exports into the securitization-based housing finance system and used this infrastructure as an instrument of hegemonic power. In doing so, the Russian government shielded homeowners from exposure to financial risk. In contrast, Polish political elites pursued liberal statecraft strategies and a mode of global economic integration based on foreign capital inflows. Polish political parties therefore enabled foreign banks to dominate the housing finance system and sell foreign currency mortgages, which exposed homeowners to considerable financial risk. In light of these findings we call for further research into the political factors that shape the process of housing financialization, both in the post-socialist space and beyond.

This essay points to some of the ways that militaries are focused on money and economics, and addresses what this means for understanding the entanglements of security and finance. We cannot think about security in the contemporary moment without also thinking about militaries and war, and it is only by addressing how military power engages money and finance that can we better understand how insecurity is enacted.

This article examines the implications of the financialization of social impact and the emerging social impact bonds (SIBs) market for socially engaged art practices. How do SIBs, which allow for investment in social impact metrics, shift the broader contexts through which the value of social impact is understood in art discourses? In the British context, recent projects by Assemble, Open School East and others do important social work, yet echo the logic of the social investment market by outsourcing social impact. Rather than dismissing socially engaged art initiatives as having been recuperated by financialized capitalism, I suggest the need to develop new ways of achieving a double reading of these works as they relate to - and upset the distinctions between - stakeholder and bondholder valuation.

This essay identifies two approaches to theorizing the relationship between financialization and contemporary art. The first departs from an analysis of how market logics in non-financial spheres are being transformed to facilitate financial circulation; the other considers valuation practices in financial markets (and those related to derivative instruments in particular) from a socio-cultural perspective. According to the first approach, the contemporary art market is in theory a hostile environment for financialization, although new practices are emerging that are increasing its integration with the financial sphere. The second approach identifies socio-cultural similarities between the logics by which value is extracted, amplified, and distributed through derivative instruments and contemporary art. The two approaches present a discrepancy: on the one hand, contemporary art functions as an impediment to outright financialization because of market opacity; on the other, contemporary art represents a socio-cultural analog to derivative instruments. The essay concludes by setting out the terms for a more holistic understanding of contemporary art's relationship to financialization, which would enable an integration of its economic and socio-cultural dimensions.

Reflecting on the broad ambitions of macro-finance, I argue that the commitment to placing finance at the centre of our economic conceptions comes with significant risks that speak directly to the politics of financialisation. By redirecting the focus of economic governance towards finance, macro-finance may consolidate rather than challenge the problematic trends of global finance. More specifically, I argue that the focus of the money view on liquidity has contributed to depoliticising financial governance and aligning it further with the demands of financialisation.

The prevalent consensus in critical social sciences is that finance articulates the world economy as a global hierarchy of creditor-debtor relations that reproduce and further aggravate existing income and wealth inequalities. Class struggle is correspondingly understood as a conflict between elite creditors, who are members of the global top 1% of wealth holders, and mass debtors, who are burdened by growing costs of servicing public and private debts. This article offers an alternative understanding of how debt, inequality and class relate to one another. At its basis is the recognition that over the past four decades, finance has empowered upper class borrowers, including the top 1%, as it has magnified their capacity to generate capital gains and capture greater wealth and income shares via levered-up investments and other forms of positioning in financial and property markets. The article thus provides a political economy of leverage as power, showing how contemporary global finance has not given shape to a distributional conflict between creditors and debtors as two distinct classes, but instead has set debtors against debtors, and namely the greater borrowers against the lesser ones.

Behavioral economics has become a dominant set of theories in explaining economic behavior, yet such behavior remains under the limited purview of psychological, cognitive, or neural approaches. This article draws on and extends Viviana Zelizer's social meaning of money framework in conjunction with new work in ‘relational accounting’ to suggest a sociological counterpoint, focusing in particular on the social and symbolic meaning attached to individual 401(k) retirement accounts. Following a market downturn, neoclassical and behavioral economics predict various types of behavioral responses, in particular loss aversion - where investors seek to increase risk-taking rather than locking in a sure loss (a loss is more painful to bear than an equivalent gain). A sociological theory that understands the shared meaning of retirement saving would predict something different, a behavior I call durable conservatism. In this article, I show how this concept better explains observed risk behavior in Americans’ 401(k) accounts following the 2002 and 2008 bear markets in stocks, and how that response differed from the behavior documented in non-retirement brokerage accounts.

What is the relationship now, and what should the relationship be, between a social-theory oriented critique of neoliberalism, such as the one Konings provides, and other disciplines? In this review essay, I suggest some of the conversations we might form between Konings' text and texts of a more Marxist variety, including Alfred Sohn-Rethel's Intellectual and Manual Labor, as well as contemporary literary studies texts, including Mary Poovey's Genres of the Credit Economy and Fredric Jameson's “Culture and Finance Capital”. In each potential pairing, I suggest a possible relationship between historical time, financial time, and narrative itself.

Platform economies are depicted as the foundation for a new era of economic production. This transpires through the incorporation of digital technologies and algorithmic operations into the heart of economic and financial practices. However, different assumptions are made about the effects of digital platforms depending on geographical location. While digital platforms are approached as inherent to processes of financialization globally, they are reduced to processes of financial inclusion when referencing the ‘Global South’. Analyses of financialization as a one-way-vector - Global North to Global South - overlook the variability, the limits, and responses to financialization. In contrast, a focus on market devices illustrates the specificities of value creation. An example of this is ‘the float’, a form of financial value generated by mobile telecommunication operators, mobile money issuers, and commercial banks in Africa. Through this lens, we see instances of both value subjugation and autonomization, evidence that the fault lines of value production generated by ambiguous market devices are obscured by the Global North/Global South frame.

Clare McAndrew is a leading analyst of the global art market. Here the guest editors of this special issue interview McAndrew on the structures of the art market, its sectorial and regional arrangements, and transformations in its historical, technical, and monetary operation. Their discussion highlights the rapid increase in prices for art and the global extension of the art market since the early-to-mid 2000s, as well as further changes to its operation wrought by the rise of online trading in the early 2010s.