Moral and pragmatist sociology has studied capitalism as a set of institutions that require justification, which has historically been offered through forms of rewarding and meaningful work, anchoring the human life course in a narrative of individual and collective progress. However, emerging with neoliberalism, then becoming explicit after 2008, contemporary capitalism has become organised around the logic of assets and wealth as opposed to labour and production. This provokes a vacuum of justification. Once all actors are (as Minsky argued) balance sheet actors and profit becomes a function of sheer temporality, the economy ceases to function as a moral order and instead becomes imbued with existential concerns of temporality, durability, survival, and finitude. Possessed only of certain contingently acquired assets and liabilities, the self becomes wholly contingent in the sense described by Heidegger; that is, as ‘thrown’ into having had a past and into a relationship of ‘care’ towards the future. The article identifies symptoms of this existential condition in empirical studies of wealth elites, for whom (in the absence of conventional liberal and production-based measures of worth) problems of meaning, purpose, and finitude are endemic.

This article explores venture capital (VC) as a means and process of accumulating future social necessity. It explores the mechanisms of growth that make VC-backed firms distinct. I argue that a distinctive feature of surplus value capture through VC is valorization via socially necessary contracted space-time, a corrective to Marx’s theorization of socially necessary labor time, which appears incomplete in the context of VC. First, extending Marx’s general formula for capital, I develop a general formula for VC, demonstrating how the VC investment upends traditional theories of capitalist accumulation. Second, I argue that VC invests in firms seeking to capture ‘human capital’ resources and uncapitalized market ‘space’ (noncapitalist social logics of exchange) with the aim of achieving ‘product-market fit’. Third, I demonstrate how time and space are contracted under the VC process as a value capture (VC) mechanism relating to future social necessity. VC is, I argue, about accumulating today what we will all need to be consuming tomorrow, just to keep up with social norms. Finally, I explore how the valorization of crisis (VC) demonstrates the accumulation of future social necessity in practice. I conclude with thoughts concerning the possibility of alternatives beyond the overdetermined rapacity of ‘VC’.

In what ways might the digital renminbi (RMB), also known as e-CNY, bolster China’s efforts to internationalize its currency? Utilizing Susan Strange’s concept of currency negotiation and borrowing the concept of infrastructures from science, technology, and society studies, this article argues that RMB internationalization is a gradual process that relies heavily on negotiation involving both state and non-state actors (i.e., private financial authorities). It further argues that while e-CNY may create new opportunities for RMB internationalization, it also raises new challenges. First, the e-CNY’s lack of coordination with other central banks represents a challenge for future evolution and standardization with other digital currency platforms, thus rendering first-mover status a potential disadvantage. Second, as a result of China’s divergent data governance direction from both the US and the EU, the e-CNY is disadvantaged when it comes to interoperability, trust of users, and diversity of data. The purpose of this study is not to predict the future of RMB internationalization once the e-CNY rolls out but rather to highlight various ways in which the latter may influence the former in order to widen analyses of the topic.

As sustainable finance has entered the mainstream, it has become an area of contestation among civil society, political and business. In response, policy makers seek to resolve stalemates and enhance legitimacy by utilising multistakeholder, consensus-driven approaches to policymaking. In this paper, we examine these emergent ‘cooperative’ structures from a network analytic perspective. Our structural analysis is based on six national and three EU policy spaces. We conduct compositional analyses to explore the makeup of the network(s) and use a range of centrality measures to capture emerging elites. We find an increase in civil society participation in these policy spaces over time; however, financial firms and pro-business voices remain dominant players. We also find a small cluster of elite actors from a range of stakeholder groups. We conclude that the increasing structural balance of stakeholder interests, however, does not translate into power for civil society to alter the direction of policymaking, but appears to serve enhancing the legitimacy of a policy process that departs from the priority and aspirations of civil society organisations.

This article conceptualizes financial transactions as parts of financial infrastructures. Not only do transactions perform services for the economy, mainly in the area of calculation and pricing, but there is also merit in a conceptually infrastructural view on transactions which uncovers their ambivalence for the stability of the financial system. This is based on a conceptualization of infrastructures that distances itself from inherited modernist notions of the completeness, full operability, and functional integration of infrastructures, and instead highlights the constitutive incompleteness, error-proneness, and looming disintegration of infrastructures owing not to external threats but to their very modes of operation. The article analyzes two post-crisis reports that try to sort out this infrastructural ambivalence of transactions, and, in that attempt, mobilize different imaginaries. In the Brady Report following Black Monday of 1987, the imaginary of the efficient competitive market was cited to stabilize the boundary between functional and dysfunctional transactions. In the FCIC Report reflecting on the subprime mortgage crisis, a quasi-sociological diagnosis of mushrooming, and morally problematic transactional relationships were invoked to separate functional from dysfunctional intermediation by financial transactions.

In this article, I offer a historical analysis of how bankers in Luxembourg came to be important service providers to borrowers in the Belgian Congo and Apartheid South Africa. I demonstrate how a series of unique political and cultural factors linking Luxembourg and these two (neo)colonial regimes account for the financial activities that developed between the three jurisdictions. As such, I show that officials in the Belgian Congo and Apartheid South Africa were able to count on their Luxembourg-based bankers for a variety of finance-related services, including the provision of Eurocurrency loans and the formation of offshore companies. In doing so, the article contributes to a body of literature in the social sciences of finance that has grown significantly in recent years: on the imperial and neocolonial basis of the contemporary global financial system.

This article investigates the promise of Insurtech to expand the frontier of the insurance market to include vulnerable populations around the world. It contributes to current debates on the proliferation of new technologies for financial inclusion as embedded in contemporary forms of platform-based capitalism. We argue that Insurtech’s promises fall short of expectations because of the contradiction between the principles of platform scalability and insurance risk pooling. Such contradictions lead Insurtech platforms to unpool risk rather than provide innovative technologies to pool it. This ultimately limits the expansion of markets for inclusive insurance as Insurtech platforms struggle to scale up the market through their supposedly disruptive technology. Our analysis draws on a range of regulatory reports, complemented by in-depth interviews with Insurtech executive officers. The article offers insights into the contradictory principles currently driving the digital inclusive insurance market, as well as the limits to the ongoing global expansion of platform capitalism.

Sustainable finance is often discussed as a solution to the climate crisis, but its impacts are limited and its discourse focuses on mobilising private investments through public de-risking, without considering direct government action. We argue that this is due to an implicit reference to mainstream economic theory assuming that an active state leads to time inconsistency problems and crowding-out effects. However, these assumptions have been sufficiently refuted as public investments may actually crowd-in private capital. We therefore propose a paradigm shift towards what we call Public Sustainable Finance, aimed at empowering the role of the state in the green transition on the discursive, policy, and political economy levels. Studying the case of Germany, we show how Public Sustainable Finance can be introduced despite tight fiscal regimes. To this end, we propose that the Climate- and Transformation Fund be given its own borrowing powers. By borrowing an average of 23 billion euros annually from 2024 to 2030, the existing financing gap that has been exacerbated following the November 2023 constitutional court ruling can be closed, enabling a more rapid and effective green transition.

While FinTech gets promoted as an innovative and progressive solution to meeting financial needs globally, it is afflicted by pervasive gender inequalities, only recently noticed in research. To explore these gender inequalities at the core of FinTech, we use a mixed-methods approach, combining data on 100 leading FinTech firms and 15 interviews with FinTech professionals, collected in the latter half of 2021. We argue that women in FinTech face the ‘triple glass ceiling’ at the intersection of financial, technological, and entrepreneurial gender inequalities. Our sample shows that women account for only 7.69% of (co-)founders, 18.2% of executive committee members, and merely 4.04% of FinTech companies are led by a woman. Gendered stereotypes and a privileging of masculine performances produce significant barriers to women entering and progressing within FinTech. Discriminatory practices are overt and implicit, everyday and exceptional, micro and acute. Shattering the ‘triple glass ceiling’ in FinTech represents an immense challenge.

This article contributes to an understanding of how real estate financialisation unfolds within a city in the global South, Johannesburg. It firstly shows that compared to what has been witnessed in the global North, real estate financialisation in South Africa is characteristically conservative: market actors do not engage in high-risk, low-income neighbourhoods. Indeed, in Johannesburg, financialisation has displayed minimal interest in residential markets. Instead, financialisation in the city has been driven by commercial property investments, typically in the form of urban enclaves such as securitised office parks, malls, mixed-use developments, and increasingly ‘satellite cities’ built from scratch. This article considers how the selective character of financialisation in the country is mediated by power relations in the global political economy. In particular, it highlights how South Africa’s status as an ‘emerging market’ encourages a prudent lending regime for domestic financial institutions and real estate actors.

Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression, the Economic Space Agency’s latest experiment in radical economic design, explores the possibility of designing a digitally native economy that is geared towards care, the arts, and the environment, and which not only refuses to give up on the financial frontiers of contemporary capitalism, but actively seeks to marshal them towards innovative ends. The architecture of a novel economic space comes into view through a set of protocols, which integrate economic information within a social value framework. This ‘Economic Space Protocol’ involves crafting a new grammar for economic information production processes that have traditionally been tied to competitive market behavior. This essay interrogates the place of finance in the book, emphasizing price discovery’s generativity with regards to information. What is necessary in the imagination of any postcapitalist future are radical design initiatives that contend with both the necessity and the limits of the price discovery process.

I use this introduction to the book forum to situate my work within scholarly discussions of relevance to the readers of Finance and Society, thereby indicating how my work advances the broader field. I also provide a brief synopsis of the book’s core findings and offer some ideas on how to think with and beyond the book.

Brett Christophers’ Our Lives in Their Portfolios documents the rising dominance of asset managers in tangible assets that matter to society, such as housing and infrastructure. He rightly describes the social harm of asset managers who focus on short-term wealth extraction from assets that require long-term investment. Where Christophers focuses less is on another structural question raised: why are the financial assets of working people in public and union pension funds managed by these extractive asset managers in the first place? How do we take our lives out of their portfolios?

Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression is a book published by members of the Economic Space Agency. Its objective is to frame protocols (social agreements) on which to build the conditions for an economic system that is distributed (no centralised control) and can express network views about what constitutes, and how to measure, ‘value’ (value beyond profit). An insightful review by William Morgan (2024) probes some key dimensions of our project. This reply both reframes some of William’s insights and takes issue with others, especially those which emphasise a Hayekian interpretation.

In The Rise of Central Banks, Leon Wansleben provides a perceptive account of the evolution of central banking practices in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Switzerland from the 1970s through the subprime mortgage crisis and the global pandemic. Focusing on the concrete practices of monetary policymakers, Wansleben usefully explores the relationship between the development of novel techniques of monetary policy implementation and the financialization of the economy, with the paradox that the central bank appears more powerful, but exercises this power in a system that is ever more prone to crisis. While agreeing with the broad strokes of Wansleben’s analysis, I raise questions about the nature of the ‘infrastructural power’ exercised by the state through financial markets, suggesting that the growing salience of the central bank in the policymaking apparatus should not be conflated with its independent influence over the direction of economic policy.

Leon Wansleben’s new book, The Rise of Central Banks, explains how central banks have emerged as powerful monetary governors over the past half-century. Yet the book’s recognition that central banks cannot extricate themselves from quantitative easing and market bailouts begs the question: what does it mean for central banks to be dominant but captive? In this commentary, I identify the book’s ambiguities with the concept of infrastructural power the book draws from Michael Mann. Unless the dynamics of state-market interdependence are well specified, giving due attention to the sources of both public and private power, it is unclear what kind of agency central bankers are exercising if they lack sufficient autonomy to act in the public interest.

In this essay, I argue that Christophers’ description of asset-manager society is best characterized by a logic of ‘acquire and extract’. I build on his insights to delve into the less-explored world of emancipatory alternatives. I argue for radical transformations – what I term ‘democratic ruptures’ – that shift the investment logic of asset managers toward one of ‘build and nourish’. With insights from the failure to establish economic democracy over large pools of finance by unions in the postwar period, I argue that the crucial missing ingredient in the social and ecological disaster of asset-manager society today is democracy. I conclude with a radical reimagining of financial democracy for the twenty-first century.

This article reviews Paul Crosthwaite’s Speculative Time: American Literature in an Age of Crisis (2024) and Liliana Doganova’s Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (2024), situating them within recent scholarship on a future-oriented, speculative, and economic subject. It focuses on the relationship between financial speculation and temporalities in the twentieth century, specifically on futures and the politics of value in American literature and the calculating technology of discounting. These books bridge what have been two distinct scholarly approaches to studies of capitalist futures: a theoretical focus on futures as cultural imaginaries or narratives of economic action and a material emphasis on practices for anticipating futures and managing risk. The article concludes with a discussion of power and profit in speculation and discounting, emphasizing inequitable access to speculative futures, and suggests that the multidirectional, nonlinear, recursive mode of financialized temporalities in these books might offer a guide to imagining and creating more just futures for us all.

Leon Wansleben’s new book, The Rise of Central Banks: State Power in Financial Capitalism, tells an intricately complex story of the world’s most influential central banks successfully harnessing the forces of financial globalization to build their institutional power as the principal managers of their national economies. The book argues that, regardless of central banks’ rationales and rationalizations, the resulting expansion of global money markets has failed to generate the intended macroeconomic and societal benefits. Instead, as became evident in the post-2008 era, the world’s most powerful central banks are now structurally dependent on the increasingly self-referential markets for financial assets. While the book’s narrative is focused on inflation targeting and other monetary policy innovations since the 1970s, it raises much broader questions and invites further reflection on the nonlinear dynamics of power in today’s financial markets and the uncertain future of central banks.

What has actually happened to the political economy of the United States over the last half-century? For too long now, ‘neoliberalism’ has been the standard answer given, yet today, the term seems to have lost both its analytic and critical capacities. Melinda Cooper’s Counterrevolution offers readers a fresh and productive response to this fundamental question of contemporary political economy. Cooper comes neither to praise nor bury neoliberalism but to shift from the level of generalizing accounts or polemics to the level of concrete ideas and the policies they have engendered. She directs attention away from the Chicago school and toward both the Virginia School of public choice theory and a long line of supply-side thinkers. On strictly economic grounds, these two strands ought to be in tension, but Cooper illuminates their political convergence: agreeing to constrain ‘certain kinds of public spending’, they implemented a politics committed to inflating asset values for the wealthy while holding workers’ wage growth in check. This balance-sheet insurrection, which directs the flow of capitalist value upward, stopped and reversed the potential Keynesian revolution that had been underway in the 1950s and 1960s.