Since at least the nineteenth century, economists have imagined the market as a profoundly rational way of organizing society. These visions betray a mechanical conception of economy. In many ways the contemporary financial economy does look like a machine. But if global finance is a machine, then there is something irrational, something supernatural – even magical – about the way it operates. It is not just the periodic bouts of mania, panic, and crisis; nor is it the apparently endless drive to accumulate, to conjure more and more wealth out of a void. It is that in these and other processes, a range of psychic investments are at work – curious attachments that bind us to money, to projected futures, to imaginary orders, and ultimately, to the modes of power upon which capitalism depends. The magical parts make and move the mechanical whole. This is the controversial idea developed in a string of new books to which this forum is dedicated.

Recent decades of financialisation have seen a significant growth in art that mobilises various forms of money as artistic media. These range from the integration of material money (coins, bills, credit cards) into aesthetic processes, such as sculpture, painting, performance, and so on, to a preoccupation with more ephemeral thematics including debt, economics, and the dynamics of the art market. This article explores three (and a half) strategies that artists use to engage with money: crass opportunism; a stark revelation of money's power; a coy play with art's subjugation to money; and a more profound attempt to reveal the shared labour at the heart of both money and art's aesthetic-political power. Money's perennial appeal to artists stems from the irony of its tantalising capacity to almost represent capitalist totality. At their core, both money and art are animated by a certain creative labour, a suspension of disbelief, and a politics of representation. Artistic practices that use money can provide critical resources for studying, understanding, and seeing beyond the rule of speculative capital.

The financial crisis of 2007-8 sparked a variety of responses from elites and popular movements across the world. Its legacy also continues to shape capitalist societies through ongoing processes of regulatory reform, state restructuring, and financial innovation. While these processes are open-ended, they are increasingly subject to critical attention from a range of commentators. The usual suspects are out in force – academics, politicians, and pundits – but they are now joined by a wider array of theorists and activists, playwrights, novelists and artists. The financialisation of capitalism, it seems, has finally been met with a blooming of the financial imagination. Finance and Society will provide a space for the further development of this imagination, generating new insights into how money and finance organise social life.

The Excessive Deficit Procedure (EDP) is a political mechanism that aims at ‘multilevel governance’ of state indebtedness in the European Union. As such, it has become the concern of research that asks how sovereignty becomes articulated in this process. This article approaches this question through the conceptualization of a modular notion of sovereignty elaborated through a discussion of work on the finance-security nexus. The article argues that existing accounts of the formation of sovereign power in relation to state debt can be combined into a notion of modular sovereignty when seen through the prism of critiques of contractualism that take issue with liberal notions of state sovereignty and credit security. This way, the indebted state becomes visible as the referent object of multiple, and potentially contradictory, invocations of sovereignty as exercised in the EDP. First, it figures as the seat of budget sovereignty, holding its social substrate liable for its debts while ignoring inequalities in that substrate. Second, it is appealed to, within a biopolitical rationality, as the sovereign guarantor of the financial wellbeing of its population. Third, it is seen as the executor of financial wisdom that is mobilized in struggles between different levels of financial governance in the EDP.

How does financialization of the economy impact public governance of natural resources? One way includes a shift in how savings and cash accumulation are understood and practiced within public agencies. This article proffers that in the second half of the twentieth century, it became a taken-for-granted understanding that long-term savings should be held in financial investment accounts instead of traditional savings accounts. As a result of this, municipal organizations act as fiscally independent investors, marshaling economic resources to pursue strategic objectives that align with financialized institutional logics. Using a case study of the largest supplier of drinking water in the US, this article examines how the use of financial investments by a major public resource agency, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, evolved since first establishing an investment policy in the 1940s. Today, this organization maintains investments worth over one billion dollars. Analysis of archival documents suggests that financial activities, even if yielding dwindling returns over time, are counted upon as a source of revenue, deployed to obtain favorable bond ratings, used for access to earmarked funds, and leveraged to acquire land in water-strategic locations. Considering the ubiquity of these financial practices among medium to large-sized municipal governing bodies, the results of this study are suggestive and generalizable across substantive governing fields and in other locations. Ultimately, this study shows that public governance agencies are intertwined with private capital flows, problematizing the oft-assumed distance between public and private actors. The article also interrogates the influence that financial markets have over of public policy, showing that elected governance officials engage in the commodification of money, encouraging the further commodification of environmental resources.

Joseph Vogl's new book, Capital and Ressentiment (2021/2022), traces an epistemic shift from knowledge to information driven by the convergence of financialization and the platform economy. As a variable that is determined less by semantic content than by difference to existing expectations, information invites indifference to other distinctions, such as those between fact and fiction, claim and proof. The circulation of information takes the form of opinion markets wherein the production of reality itself is at stake. In this extract, taken from the book's final chapter, “The cunning of ressentiment-driven reason”, Vogl analyses populist ressentiment as both structural affect of and vital resource for information capitalism, laying out the resulting reconfiguration of the social.

Infrastructure in several economies in the Global South has rapidly undergone financialization, aided and abetted by governments opening-up their infrastructure assets to global institutional investors in search of stable, predictable revenue streams. This account of financialization could be the end of the story were it not for the fact that Christophers (2015) and others have shown that institutional investors are not simply in the game of ‘finding’ value or ‘harvesting it’ from obliging states, rather they actively construct it. What often catches the eye, however, are the more overt forms of financial engineering (Ashton et al., 2012), whereas what tends to go unnoticed are the ways in which infrastructure assets are routinely ‘worked’ to generate value over time. Here, we draw attention to a slower-paced financialization of infrastructure assets where, following Chiapello (2015, 2020), investors are engaged in a continual process of evaluation and revaluation of their assets to add value over and above prevailing benchmarks. Taking the example of Canada's Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP) and its extensive investments in Chilean water infrastructure, this article considers how a global investment fund draws on financial practices developed in the advanced economies to add value to long term infrastructure assets in the Global South. Such practices, we argue, enact a routine form of financial subordination which does not match the familiar image of wholly subservient and dominated dependent economies. Rather, the power asymmetries involved equate less to a zero-sum game and more to a game where the benefits are unequally shared between asset managers in the Global North and states in the Global South, where effectively the latter cooperate in their own submission in ways that are not always acknowledged as such.

In this essay we propose a reframing of the Bloomberg Terminal, an interface used to track financial trades and values, by using it as a creative, critical and curatorial device to explore the relationship between the art and finance. To contextualise this approach, we offer a history of the Bloomberg Terminal alongside an analysis of the power of interfaces to shape both the user and the represented information. We use the terminal as a way to critique the relationship between art acquisition and financial trading companies. We then describe some outcomes of a series of workshops themed around the idea of ‘building an alternative Bloomberg’. We conclude by offering some potential applications of a re-framed Bloomberg Terminal as an open and modular interface for engaging with issues around art and finance, both in terms of content and curation.

How do private equity firms decide on a fair price for a business? Drawing on 76 semi-structured interviews, this article contributes to the sociology of finance and valuation studies by showing that pricing companies is not just a valuation operation but also a capital-repartition issue. In so doing, it shows how concrete, local pricing methods contribute to the financialisation of the economy through the creation of a new capital accumulation centre. The article's ethno-accounting approach describes three pricing steps: first, the capital access rules applicable to the private equity firm members (the price rationale); second, the expectations about the capital that can be transferred from the business to the private equity firm (the theoretical price level); and third, the transaction participant coordination mechanisms (culminating in the actual price). This description of the practices and concepts inherent in business valuation sidesteps the traditional divide between price formation in constructivist concepts of value as well as price discovery in substantivist concepts of value. Instead, value is defined as the expectation of a transfer of capital from the productive sphere to the private equity firm.

Traditional societies were defined by a prevalence of the past in the definition of the present. United States (US) society seems to show the opposite trend: the present is defined as the preparation of the future. Financial temporality can be seen as an example of the present use of the future, transforming future possibilities into available wealth. As the financial crisis has shown, however, the temporality of the future is more complex and circular. This article deals with quantitative easing (QE) as a financial instrument with an essentially temporal nature (in the sense that it uses time and acts on the future and on expectations). The success of QE in the US economy reveals essential aspects of US temporality, but also raises questions as to how it may differ from European temporality. The analysis of QE measures and their impact also offers ways to assess whether and by which means politics can intervene into finance, as well as what consequences and uncertainties are created in the process.

This essay explores the organisational character of Facebook's Libra currency by undertaking a critical reading of documents published by the Libra Association. Drawing on the conceptual work of Marilyn Strathern and Michel Serres, it illustrates how ownership cuts the network and encourages parasitism as a means of driving future profit. Central to this is the claim that Libra is not an exercise in democratising money, but rather, the opposite: Libra is run as a club, for the benefit of club members. The conceptual theme of ‘cutting’ is used to organise the argument. Rather than a cutting-edge technology, Libra's true innovation is organisational and consists in overturning the decentralised character of blockchain, such that distributed ledger technology is re-centralised by big tech firms. Outsiders are thus cut-off from Libra; only those inside the club have the right to participate in Libra and its governance. This position also affords members an exclusive capacity to take a cut of the profits generated through Libra. As a private organisation, members have sole rights to future profits generated from the Libra ecosystem and are in this way incentivised to create new product opportunities over time.

This special issue explores how finance deploys time, structures the future, and interacts with actors and institutions that sometimes function according to very different temporal regimes. Finance capitalism's logic of recurrence, repetitive cycles, and successive ruptures has long been with us, but the essays in this special issue are particularly interested in how recent decades of intensified financialization have restructured temporal experience. They interrogate the production and dissemination of agency in an age of acceleration, risk, and uncertainty, asking how the temporality inscribed in financial transactions emerges from and simultaneously shapes individual and social practice. Topics covered range from the logic of finance and foundational concepts of financial theory to the intersection between objective structures and social practice, the role of literature, and finally questions of social insecurity, political action, and the possibility of resistance within a context of competing temporalities. In this introduction, the editors delineate some fundamental concepts and questions for our financial times.

This essay makes the case that current debates about the ‘moneyness’ of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are occurring at the incorrect scale. Rather than being some form of transnational digital money to be used alongside or compete with national fiat currencies, I argue that, instead, each cryptocurrency represents its own self-contained ‘money-world’. Put differently, a cryptocurrency is the uniquely specified unit of account and medium of exchange within the socio-technical bounds of its own blockchain. This new perspective can open new lines of intellectual dialogue and inform better policy choices for regulating cryptocurrencies.

Scholarship on the finance-security nexus has typically been concerned with ‘first order’ phenomena, such as the interpenetration of the finance and security sectors. This article contributes to the debate by turning to an apparent epiphenomenon, namely The LEGO Movie, and using it to address some overlooked intersections between popular culture and the finance-security complex. The analysis first focuses on how finance and security are represented in the film, through the plot and the fictional company at the centre of the film's conflict, to its LEGO minifigure characters and the playsets featured therein. The focus then shifts to how the LEGO Group's business model informs the film in significant ways, from the plot's motivation and structure, and the mise-en-scène, to how the film was produced. My argument throughout is that a seemingly innocent or insignificant film in fact participates in the financialization and securitization of daily life through its very style and status as a cultural product. Key here is how The LEGO Movie does this in ways that confound possible critique through the use of irony and cute aesthetics, as well as through its own supposed triviality.

Timothy Johnson's working hypothesis in his review of my latest book, The Medium of Contingency, is that I (as well as the ‘quants’ involved in the derivative pricing industry) do not understand the foundations of abstract probability theory. In this response, I show that this is not the case. On the contrary, rules and protocols which are common in the derivative pricing industry, the result of which can be an extension of abstract probability theory as it now stands, seem to elude Johnson. To address these failings, I provide theoretical reflections on probability theory and its formalisms.

Proposing a non-moralistic critique of the changes to neoliberal capitalism post-crisis, Konings provides a refreshing take on the dynamics of financial governance, emphasizing the way linkages between state and finance are structured by a speculative logic internal to neoliberalism. In this essay, I raise a number of questions about this characterization of neoliberalism, focusing on issues of agency and durability. First, does the turn to systems theory allow for a satisfactory account of the role that agency has played in the historical expansion of neoliberalism? And second, is it possible to envisage an end to neoliberalism when neoliberalism is so closely identified with capital dynamics in general?

The theory of the monetary circuit aims to provide a highly stylised account of the workings of a modern monetary production economy. While there may have been a time when it succeeded in this aim, that time is over. The key development in the monetary sphere of capitalism over recent decades is the advent of financialisation, a phenomenon that circuit theory cannot explain other than by omitting some of its most important characterising features while indiscriminately dismissing those features that it does address as dysfunctional outgrowths. The fact is that a theory that has the aggregate monetary circuit as its methodological framework and whose sole focus is on the financing needs of firms is simply not flexible enough to accommodate the new reality of financialisation. To make that accommodation what is needed is a framework that is sufficiently elastic as to be able to encompass a broad range of socio-economic factors, most notably those associated with demographic change, as co-drivers of financialisaton. This article argues that a framework based on Marx's commodity principle meets this requirement.

The crisis of 2008 was a watershed event for the study of finance and society. There was the boom in financial markets that came to a head with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and there was the boom in financial scholarship that followed in its wake. But what comes after this second boom? After more than a decade of rapid expansion under the shadow of 2008, what comes next for the new finance studies? What are the emerging debates that matter most? Where lies the need for further theorisation and for new empirical work? In this editorial, these questions are pursued under three broad headings, each corresponding to an overarching imperative: first, the need to keep a vigilant watch on the core institutions and logics of finance; second, the need to continue expanding and deepening the field; and third, the need to persist with difficult lines of questioning.

While institutional frameworks are the dominant approach to analysing the geography of finance, this article focuses on how individual policymakers influence the characteristics of financial institutions and set, or even alter, financial centre development. The historical narratives from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) that this article presents reveal postsocialist reformers’ contrasting philosophies and approaches, despite their shared goals of market liberalisation and European integration. These reforms (or lack thereof) differentiated the securities markets in Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest, especially with respect to financial intermediary mechanisms. Although the legacies of such reforms continue to shape an uneven landscape of financial centres in CEE, this article proposes reformer-centred narratives as an alternative to deterministic institutional thinking. The article argues that historical narratives that foreground the actions and ideas of key policymakers need to be included in the observation framework of financial centre development, in a similar way to how scholars analyse foreign policy by focusing on the heads of governments and ministers.

Much has been learned about calculation, commodification and marketization from the social studies of markets and finance. But what of capitalization? What is distinctive about this mode of valuation and the reality it impels? What does it mean to live under the ‘asset condition’? In Capitalization: A Cultural Guide, Fabian Muniesa and his colleagues at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation take us on a tour across multiple continents and several centuries, introducing us to capitalization as a ‘cultural syndrome’. Their pragmatist enquiry involves tracing capitalization via the scenarios in which value is created, and the gaze that stimulates such value-creation. The result is a field guide to the terrain of capitalization that integrates anthropological work on the dramaturgy of finance with sociological attention to the technicalities of valuation. The stage is set for further investigation into the uneven distribution of the capacity to capitalize and its consequences.