The UK government has called for employers to make work adaptations in response to changes in health individuals may experience as they age. However, government assumptions place too much emphasis on the voluntary actions of employers and managers, without placing the management of health in a wider context. Drawing on insights from Thompson’s disconnected capitalism thesis, we explore whether financial/competitive pressures facing many private and public sector organisations today, alongside other factors, contribute to organisations not considering or implementing work adaptations. In this context, it is suggested that older workers may also hide health issues because of anxiety, or ‘ontological precarity’, regarding working longer. Qualitative case studies compare the delivery of work adaptations in three organisations: ‘Local Government’, ‘Hospitality’, and ‘Trains’. Work adaptations were only widely available in Trains; this was for a range of reasons, including the fact that Trains was relatively insulated from financial pressures and able to deliver job and financial security for older workers. As many older workers will continue to be employed by organisations similar to Local Government and Hospitality, we argue that policy makers cannot rely solely on employers to make adaptations.

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 develops a pragmatic theory of finance in which markets are considered to be centres of communicative action in the face of uncertainty. This contrasts with the conventional approach that portrays markets as centres of strategic action in the face of scarcity. The argument follows Habermas and entails that a financial market must address the truthfulness, truth, and rightness of the statements made by its participants (i.e., the prices quoted). I claim that these discursive norms have been implicit in historical financial markets as expressed in the norms of sincerity, reciprocity, and charity. I conclude by proposing that ‘trust’ in commerce is a synthesis of the three discursive norms. The motivation of the article is to address the crisis of legitimacy that the financial system is experiencing, particularly in the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US).

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.

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 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.

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 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.

What happens to classic Marxist notions of revolution, exploitation and class struggle under the premise that we live in the age of financial rather than industrial capitalism? In this essay I argue that the logic of finance is the main structuring principle of the circulation of value, capital, and money today. Accordingly, we should no longer just think of class struggle in terms of workers and capitalists but also in terms of debtors and creditors. In financial capitalism class is determined by one's position relative to the production of money. This also means that a contemporary idea of revolution is a matter of radical change in the way that money comes into being.

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.

Geoffrey Harcourt remained a steadfast left Keynesian all his life. He applied his economic analysis in framing policy recommendations targeting the welfare of the poor. He undertook incisive and comprehensive surveys of the work of Cambridge post-Keynesians, some of whom were involved intellectually or practically in the economics of developing economies. Keynes, remaining an imperialist as far as India was concerned, nevertheless produced a corpus which has been immensely helpful in understanding developing economies and prescribing policy solutions for them. First, Keynes created the modern macroeconomics discipline and refined the concept of national income, allowing methods of collecting and organising economic and social data enabling assessment of intersectoral impacts. Second, still relevant today is his idea of an International Clearing Union, disciplining countries with excessive balance of payments surpluses or deficits, even though American opposition at Bretton Woods prevented its adoption. Third, although an economist of the short run, Keynes took up issues of vital concern for the development of an underdeveloped economy, departing from his long-held fears about excessive population growth and contributing to policies for stabilising commodity prices. While Keynes remained a Eurocentric imperialist, his dreams for Europe in general and Britain in particular proved relevant for many developing countries today. He supported public investment and state involvement in solving problems of unemployment and industrial restructuring. His analysis of the instability of stock markets and dangers of financialisation remains highly relevant in a world experiencing major stock market crashes in almost every decade since the 1970s.

Financialisation is now an emerging field of research. Recently, the field has attracted criticism for its focus on large-scale economic processes, such as profit accumulation based not on production, but on a diversification of financial risk management tools – a focus which ignores the way in which individuals and households experience financialisation in everyday life. In addressing this gap, theorists have sought to understand financialisation as it relates to individuals as consumers and investors, increasing their need to integrate financial calculation into daily life. This article takes the analysis two steps further. First, it argues that precarious work is actually an aspect of financialisation, based on risk-shifting by employing organisations – a process of structural change in the labour market that actually undermines individual workers’ capacity to manage financial risk successfully. Second, it argues that financialisation is an ideology or narrative of individual responsibility, which seeks to legitimate structural change by promising emancipation through individual calculation. It draws on interviews with precarious workers to explore the gap between such norms of financial self-determination and the lived experience of insecure employment. It identifies this paradox of precariousness by focusing on people in professional occupations, who in theory are best placed to successfully negotiate economic change.

Australia developed a strong and successful automotive manufacturing industry after the Second World War, based on active industrial policy. But in 2017, mass vehicle assembly in the country will cease altogether, as the last global automakers operating in the country close their final plants, with negative spillover effects along the automotive manufacturing supply chain. After 2017, Australia will be the only major industrial country with no vehicle assembly whatsoever. This article analyses the shifts in industrial policy that explain both the initial postwar expansion, and the subsequent decline and closures. Policy-makers incorrectly assumed that the critical goal of stimulating automotive exports could be achieved through trade liberalisation, but dismantling tariffs only stimulated vehicle imports without increasing overseas demand for Australian cars. Production declined in tandem with tariffs, and there was no clear industry policy strategy for facilitating the redirection of released resources to more productive manufacturing activity, when that outcome, predicted in neoliberal comparative advantage theory, failed to materialise. Financial market deregulation, resulting in financialisation of the economy, coupled with high commodity prices, resulted in an overvalued and volatile currency, attracting foreign investors to resources and asset speculation while appearing to increase manufacturing production costs. A clear contrast is drawn between Australia’s policy passivity in recent decades, and the continued policy activism visible in other jurisdictions of all political orientations – including countries which, particularly after the global financial crisis, faced economic and industrial challenges at least as daunting as Australia’s. In the 1970s, Australia had been among the world’s top 10 auto manufacturers; after 2017, it will be one of only two G20 countries completely lacking mass automotive manufacturing capacity. The industry’s disappearance from Australia is shown to have resulted from some unique policy choices: understanding them may help avert future similar policy errors.

Financialisation and financial risk have become current buzzwords, but the connections between finance and labour are not well developed. Often labour is cast simply as the distributional victim of developments like shareholder value, the privatisation of public infrastructure and labour market reform. This article engages developments in the construction industry and locates a growing financial logic inside ‘production’ and work in that sector. Through the concepts of liquidity and risk, we identify causal connections, not just parallels, between financial innovation and the reorganisation of the logic and structure of work in the Australian construction and property services industry.

This paper presents new data on the nature and consequences of the risks for retirees inherent in the Australian retirement income system. This system can be regarded as ‘financialised’ in that retirement savings are primarily managed by non-government financial institutions and, although the Age Pension remains as a safety net, responsibility for the provision and management of retirement incomes has increasingly shifted to individuals. In this article we report the results of a qualitative study of older mixed-sex couple households’ experiences of this system and discuss the implications for retirement incomes policy. We conclude that while the system of government-mandated employer superannuation contributions (the Superannuation Guarantee) is undoubtedly raising the living standard of many older Australians, the financialised nature of the retirement income system, as a whole, poses significant financial risks for many retirees.

About USD7 trillion of quantitative easing funds has flooded emerging markets since 2008. These funds, created to stimulate a recovery in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and to stabilise financial markets, ended up mostly as emerging markets’ corporate bonds and loans (often after being leveraged into many multiples of their original value). Not for the first time, emerging markets became the financial markets of last resort. These funds were then either mainly invested (Asia) or used (as in Latin America and South Africa) for almost anything except for creating additional productive capacities. Enquiries into these issues, especially how corporations financed their investment, were subjects that fascinated economist Ajit Singh. He was the first to find out that corporations in emerging markets relied much more on external finance than those in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (where retained profits played a major role). The implication was that they were likely to be more susceptible to the vicissitudes of financial markets, and these have become even more weird since quantitative easing, as Northern ‘investors’, in search for elusive yields, have been happy to take on ever higher risks, leverage and illiquidity in the South. This is a key difference between current global financial fragilities and those at the onset of the current global financial crisis in 2007. The stakes for emerging economies and international financial markets could scarcely be higher, but unfortunately these huge new challenges occur at the worst possible time, as our social imagination has seldom been so barren.