The future is persistently considered in the sociology of finance from two divergent, problematic angles. The first approach consists in supplementing financial reasoning with an acknowledgement of the expectations that are needed in order to cope with an uncertain future and justify the viability of investment decisions. The second approach, often labelled critical, sees on the contrary in the logic of finance a negation of the future and an exacerbation of the valuation of the present. This is an impasse the response to which resides, we suggest, in considering the language of future value, which is indeed inherent to a financial view on things, as a political technology. We develop this argument through an examination of significant episodes in the history of financial reasoning on future value. We explore a main philosophical implication which consists in suggesting that the medium of temporality, understood in the dominant sense of a temporal progression inside which projects and expectations unfold, is not a condition for but rather a consequence of the idea of financial valuation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Critical macro-finance (CMF) has become an influential avenue of research aimed at shedding light on how the global payments system is governed. In the introduction to this special forum on CMF, we explore three main themes: (1) the intellectual lineage of CMF and its relation to financialisation studies; (2) the policy relevance of CMF; and (3) its ‘critical’ position.

History in Financial Times sheds light on the historiography of contemporary finance. But there is a tension in the book that is inescapable: between the production of crisis historiography, on the one hand, and the practice of the concept of crisis, on the other. There is, in other words, a barely articulated distinction between crisis as a “metahistorical force” and crisis as a “peculiar, naturalist” category.

This forum contribution outlines four propositions of the critical macro-finance approach: (1) US-led financial globalization has structurally evolved around market-based finance, driven by the production of new asset classes and the Americanization of national financial systems with changing practices for producing liquidity; (2) global finance is a set of interconnected, hierarchical balance sheets, increasingly subject to time-critical liquidity; (3) credit creation in market-based finance involves new forms of money (systemic liabilities); and (4) market-based finance structurally requires a derisking state, for both systemic liabilities and for new asset classes. The precise contours of the derisking state are determined through political struggles.

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 forum contribution explains how analyzing the creation, distribution, and destruction of contemporary credit money is placed centre stage in the emerging field of critical macro-finance. This approach not only involves traditional forms of money but also ‘shadow money’: private credit instruments which are not regulated as money from a legal standpoint, but in many respects are functionally equivalent to ‘established’ forms of money. To connect different positions in this discourse, we propose three core criteria for defining shadow money as a baseline position for future critical macro-financial research.

Loops make a fitful, but not insignificant appearance in Amin Samman's History in Financial Times. Are we locked into the category of causality by human nature, or would it be possible to invent a new one to give conceptuality to what, in the form of the loop, seems for the moment to be mere figural malaise?

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.

In this rejoinder, I discuss three fundamental deadlocks raised by contributors to this forum. These relate to the status of historical discourse, financial market logics, and above all the figure of the ‘strange loop’, which I put forward as a means of reorienting historical thought. I also offer some preliminary remarks on why History in Financial Times departs from conventional forms of historicism in political economy, as well as a further set of reflections on the contemporaneity of the book's argumentation.

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.

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.