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.

This essay was originally published in The Routledge Handbook of New Security Studies (Burgess, 2010), and has since become a key reference point in debates on the finance-security nexus. It is reproduced here as a starting point for the present forum, which aims to further advance efforts to conceptualise the relations between finance and security.

Recent years have seen greater interest in the theoretical foundations of abstract finance and their intersection with questions of philosophy and sociology. In particular, exchanges between authors such as Donald MacKenzie, Timothy Johnson, Elie Ayache, and others have debated the deterministic or contingent dynamics of markets, as well as their interdependency with the theories that purport to describe them. Working in this tradition, Elena Esposito raises a novel question in her 2011 book, The Future of Futures: could the exchange of derivative securities within financial markets entail not so much the provision of liquidity, but the transaction of time? In this article, I reconstruct Esposito's analysis, arguing that the proper response to this question should be affirmative. Particular emphasis is laid on what I take to be the two fundamental and controversial premises which support this argument: first, the endogeneity of time-relations involved in financial markets; and second, the revisability of these time- relations. The advantage of recasting Esposito's position in this way is the defence it enables against various criticisms articulated in theory and philosophy circles, such as those of Ray Brassier. Finally, I discuss the significance of Esposito's theory, not only for this class of financial transactions, but also for certain issues in the philosophy of time.

This rejoinder takes up some of the points that have been raised by the reviews of Capital and Time in this forum. It engages the question of how political economy should position itself vis-à-vis concerns about the dangers of essentialism and teleological explanation. It argues that a proper theorization of the logic of ‘leverage’ is key to the development of a political economy that appropriates the insights of post-foundational theory but is still able to account for the reality of power and inequality.

The valuation of insurance liabilities has traditionally been dealt with by actuaries, who closely monitored underlying illiquid features, assumed a long-term perspective, and exercised their own subjective, expert judgment. However, the new EU regulatory regime of Solvency II (S2) has come to require market-consistent valuation supplemented by a risk-sensitive capital. This is considered an unwanted shift towards short-termism that is misaligned with the industry's long term and countercyclical character. The new principles place the ‘technicalising’ logic of financial economics over ‘contextualising’ actuarial know-how. Following existing analytics of valuation from the ethnography of reinsurance markets and the social studies of finance, such requirements appear either as an alarming attack against the actuarial component of traditional valuation practice, or else as a preserver of it, through a process of enfolding at the heart of the financialisation project. This article holds that the case of S2 challenges both these analytics of valuation. S2’s financialisation project, precisely by attempting to construct itself, deconstructs itself into an actuarial project, in a recurring, aporetic process. In this respect, fair (or otherwise) valuation remains always undecidable, inconclusive, and thus responsible.

Exploring the historical imagination that surfaces at the time of crisis, Samman contributes to the effort to conceive of financial capitalism as a more or less distinct political, social and cultural era. The question that remains is how the narrative tropes he explores are related to finance in its narrower sense. Why does historical imagination wear these specific forms in financial times?

This article examines the conceptual transformation of what was once considered usury into finance. To counter traditional arguments that usury was exploitative and unnatural, early modern theorists reconceptualized debt as a form of investment for both borrowers and lenders. Today, this ethical justification of debt as an investment underlies the rhetoric of finance and financialization. Close examination of the realities of contemporary financialized debt, however, reveal that much of this rhetoric is misleading and false. While the rhetoric of finance is unrelentingly oriented toward the future, the lived reality of debt is one of being constrained and haunted by the past. Relatedly, this rhetoric exhorts borrowing for investment, while finance has actually had the opposite effect of making consumer debt a necessity for the majority of Americans. Taken together, these realities of debt today contradict the rhetoric of finance as investment and undermine the ethical framework on which it depends.

This article presents a close, dialogue-based ethnographic account of a group of contemporary options market makers making a decision about pricing options in Tesla, Inc. Careful attention to their deliberations reveals how the rise of algorithms and automation on financial markets have rendered traders alienated and estranged from the markets they work on for their livelihood. This alienation arises, in part, due to novel cascade effects between futures and underlying equities, which algorithmic and automated trading seems to afford, and which also relate to news events as well as the actions of politicians and prominent business people. Emerging from this alienation, traders produce a critique of how highly automated financial markets allocate capital and how ripe they are for political manipulation.

European financial regulation consistently gives governments privileged access to private investors, reflecting the anchor role assigned to sovereign securities as safe and liquid assets for the financial system. Legislative reforms after the financial crisis of 2008 further expanded the preferential treatment of sovereign securities as zero-risk claims, introduced portfolio requirements in favour of public debt, and constrained market speculation against governments. These sovereign privileges appear counterproductive for fiscal discipline and financial stability: they encourage excessive public debt issuance and make financial institutions holding government bonds - in particular from euro area countries with a variable risk profile - vulnerable to fiscal turbulence. Governments seem to have a conflict of interest. On the one hand, they are prudential regulators of financial risk-taking, on the other hand, they tend to overlook the financial sector's exposure to sovereign risk. This article considers four theories of the state-finance nexus and their solutions to this conflict of interest. The money view, the franchise view, and the modern financial repression view draw on the state's monetary and regulatory powers over finance to confirm sovereign safety. Their positions fundamentally contrast with the neoliberal view, which relies on free markets to enforce sustainable public finances. The article concludes that sovereign privileges present a fundamental dilemma for European financial governance with a neoliberal orientation: they oblige private investors to hold public debt, while weakening the role of markets in promoting fiscal discipline as the very foundation of sovereign safety.

In this essay, I examine and discuss the relationship between the market and the masses in light of recent retail-driven surges in the stock prices of firms like GameStop and AMC. Using two historical snapshots, I draw out similarities and differences between the way the collective power and rationality (or lack thereof) of the masses was portrayed in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century market literature and in recent debates about retail investor inclusion and social media or social trading platform-driven market volatility. The main difference between the historical discourse and the present situation is that the new digital market-expanding technologies enable effective retail investor mobilization and thus, increase the retail swarms’ market-moving powers, which were previously less agile and forceful. However, eased and widened market access also transforms digital life into alternative data that is subjected to age-old strategies of market exploitation.

This article argues that the problematic nature of money's ‘location’ is important to opening up its more fundamental ontology. Using examples from recent financial crises, I explore the (temporary) historical relationship between money and the nation state, the changing nature of money, and the paradoxes these produce in a world convinced that money is real and material. I conclude that whilst we cannot resolve these ingrained paradoxes, we should at the very least take account of them as we try to explain the vagaries of our money economies.

How exactly did the neoliberal imaginary that Konings describes gain so much traction? Was its speculative temporality smoothly translated into practice from the writings of Hayek and others as he suggests, or was its production a messier, more contested, and more contingent affair? In this brief commentary, I go back to one of the key historical moments that he examines, the Volcker shock of 1979-82, and examine some of the more mundane political and technical struggles that defined the early Reagan Administration’s efforts to put the neoliberal speculative logic into practice. By revealing the often-flawed material efforts that go into producing speculative temporalities, I argue that such struggles might allow us to arrive at a less teleological account of the resilience of neoliberalism.

Amin Samman's History in Financial Times addresses the need to develop more nuanced ways to account for history, given that succession, as a model of making history, so clearly falls short. His emphasis on narrative throughout the book is hugely important at a moment of widespread narrative dysfunctionality in which the distinction between fact and fiction comes to be widely contested.

This article investigates the role of the European Central Bank (ECB) in transferring financial and moral responsibility for the Eurozone crisis from the private to the public sector. Focusing on Greece, I argue that the ECB constructed the morality of the public debtor in such a way as to make this transfer of responsibility easier and the imposition of austerity measures justifiable. This in part relied on a shift in the ECB's discourse, which came to define the crisis exclusively in terms of public sector responsibility. However, the ECB also employed a range of non-linguistic policy measures aimed at intervening in the crisis. To interpret these measures I draw on Deleuze and Guattari's concept of ‘machinic enslavement’, arguing that the ECB contributed to the Greek crisis not only by defining it discursively but also by reshaping the country's financial infrastructure in crucial ways.

What began with an intense bout of crypto fever has since the onset of the pandemic engendered an explosive rise in online retail trading. While the original political promise of financial decentralization has become ever harder to sustain, the idea of democracy as access, including access to highly speculative and gamified investments, continues to capture the financial imagination.

Modern corporations have increasingly been adopting a decentred, layered, and multi-jurisdictional form as a strategy of boundary manipulation known amongst tax lawyers and accountants as ‘regulatory arbitrage’. The argument we put forward in this article is that the scholarly work that treats these strategies as mere tax avoidance practices has contributed to an underestimation and misrecognition of the way contemporary multinationals operate in markets. These strategies, which we explain in terms of arbitrage power, exploit the difference between exchanges in an imaginary ‘smooth’ market of the economic textbook and a global market that is divided among legal authorities, each imposing their own rules, regulations, and taxations. Arbitrage power exploits differences between the location of market exchange and the location of the registration of property title transfers, combining this with a manipulation of formal systems for recognizing business enterprises in order to escape some or all of the rules and regulations of society. The result is a marked difference between the ‘brochure multinational’, the way multinationals are seen and presented in their glossy brochures, and the way multinationals are legally and practically organized nowadays.

Mainstream economics must be conceived of as a sort of ‘dangerous’ knowledge – because its models (like the idea of efficient markets) offer no explanation for the regularity of crises and crashes in financial markets in the last decades; and because these models were also employed in the implementation and justification of these very markets. Just as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 once shook modern theodicy to its foundations, so the financial tremors of the last twenty years threaten to undermine the scientific status of economic theory. What is at issue is nothing less than the validity, possibility, and tenability of a liberal or capitalist oikodicy, a theodicy of the economic universe. It is likely that we are dealing here with one of the greatest and most fatal of errors of modern economics.