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.

Attending to the peculiar significance of finance(s) and the financier in Old Regime France, this article analyzes narratives that rehabilitate both, circa 1740-1755, in their political, social and biographical contexts. Positive representations are not thought to have been common. Yet following the Law debacle, restoration of traditional court finance resulted in effective administrative practices, universalizing policies and opportunities for merit, combined with money, to drive advancement, competing with hereditary privilege. Across genres, Charles Pinot-Duclos and Charles de Fieux, the Chevalier de Mouhy, depicted how upstart elites enact virtue, philanthropy and patriotism through finance. Their depictions reflected State policies and served common interests of writers and their protectors and patrons. Yet by emphasizing tensions in mid-century society, their texts also challenged readers to reflect critically on relations among finance, politics, society and indebtedness, anticipating a later focus on political economy as such. For today's readers grappling with dilemmas of modern finance, society and obligation, they provide provocative precedents.

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.

The documentary film Habilito: Debt for Life provides a case study of the conflicts and tensions that arise at the point of contact between highland migrants and Mosetenes, members of an indigenous community in the Bolivian Amazon. It focuses particularly on a system of debt peonage known locally as ‘habilito’. This system is used throughout the Bolivian lowlands, and much of the rest of the Amazon basin, to secure labor in remote areas. Timber merchants advance market goods to Mosetenes at inflated prices, in exchange for tropical hardwood timber. When it comes time to settle accounts, the indebted person often finds that the wood he has cut does not meet his debt obligation, and he has to borrow more money to return to the forest to continue logging. This permanent cycle of debt permits actors from outside these indigenous communities to maintain control over the extraction of wood and provides them with a free source of labor in the exploitation of timber resources. This system is practiced especially in remote areas where systems of patronage predominate, and where colonists with a market-based economic logic come into contact with Amazonian indigenous peoples who, historically, have not employed an economic logic of saving or hoarding.

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 documentary film Habilito: Debt for Life provides a case study of the conflicts and tensions that arise at the point of contact between highland migrants and Mosetenes, members of an indigenous community in the Bolivian Amazon.

This article examines how artists, activism, and works of art may contribute to a more textured understanding of debt in contemporary society and culture. The diversity of aesthetic practices and range of strategic interventions in which artists are organizers and activists are manifest in the Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.), advocacy initiatives by Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), and alternative, trans-local projects such as the Arts Collaboratory. These activist interventions provide the context for an examination of how artists have seized upon discourses related to debt and finance to produce works that offer a critical reappraisal of the global economy. Artists’ projects by Martha Rosler, Cassie Thornton, Zachary Formwalt, and Michael Najjar challenge audiences to rethink the invisible networks of debt and exchange by creating new visual vocabularies for ‘seeing’ debt. The emergence of activist groups, such as Liberate Tate, has also signaled renewed interest in the ethics of corporate sponsorships, museums, and environmental issues. A heightened awareness of the ethical dimensions of debt and global support for activist movements may contribute to new notions of citizenship and performative democracy that can incite individual and collective renegotiations of how we might critically rethink debt.

The prevalent consensus in critical social sciences is that finance articulates the world economy as a global hierarchy of creditor-debtor relations that reproduce and further aggravate existing income and wealth inequalities. Class struggle is correspondingly understood as a conflict between elite creditors, who are members of the global top 1% of wealth holders, and mass debtors, who are burdened by growing costs of servicing public and private debts. This article offers an alternative understanding of how debt, inequality and class relate to one another. At its basis is the recognition that over the past four decades, finance has empowered upper class borrowers, including the top 1%, as it has magnified their capacity to generate capital gains and capture greater wealth and income shares via levered-up investments and other forms of positioning in financial and property markets. The article thus provides a political economy of leverage as power, showing how contemporary global finance has not given shape to a distributional conflict between creditors and debtors as two distinct classes, but instead has set debtors against debtors, and namely the greater borrowers against the lesser ones.

This article develops a reading of Don DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis that differentiates between two thematic and poetological axes running through the text. On the one hand, Cosmopolis explores the future-fixation of the risk regime of finance capitalism; on the other, it stages scenes of insecurity that physically threaten the protagonist and his world. Insecurity, the article argues, is a condition that throughout the text increasingly gains in appeal because it promises to offer an alternative to a world of managed risk. The concern with security emphasizes finitude and mortality, thus enabling a turn to existential matters that the virtual abstractions of finance have seemingly made inaccessible. While proposing an opposition between a logic of risk based on virtuality and a logic of (in)security based on authenticity, DeLillo's novel also suggests that it is impossible to break out of the logic of risk management pervading late modernity. The appeal of (in)security articulated in Cosmopolis rather lies in the promise to existentially revitalize life within the confines of financialized capitalism.

Ayache presents a view of markets and mathematics that attempts to conform to the philosophies of Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux. However, this attempt is unsuccessful because Ayache adopts a view of probability rooted in nineteenth-century conceptions that cannot accommodate the radical uncertainty of the markets. This is unfortunate as it is reasonable to believe that the ideas of Badiou and Meillassoux, when synthesised with contemporary ideas of probability, could offer interesting insights. Roffe presents a better argued synthesis of Deleuze and markets, however he makes similar assumptions about contemporary probability that undermine his conclusions.

Securitization has a dual rationality that twins a financial sense to one of modern statecraft and national security. This forum contribution advocates a focus on material practices as a means of further exploring the entanglement of finance and security. In particular, it advances a notion of ‘chains of securitization’, arguing that such a concept provides researchers with a concrete way to analyze how ‘financial’ objects, such as derivatives, are assembled to generate (in)securities, as well as how ‘security’ objects, such as suspicious transactions, are assembled across public/private domains.

The rise of financial technology (FinTech) engenders novel business models through integrating financial services and information and communication technologies (ICT). Digital currencies and payments, data mining, and other FinTech applications threaten to radically overhaul the financial sector. This article argues that, while we are becoming aware of how technology giants such as Apple Inc. are making inroads into financial services, we need to become more sensitive to how financial incumbents mimick ICT firms while aiming to neutralize the FinTech challenge. Practices from Silicon Valley are spilling over into ‘traditional’ finance through a process we dub Appleization. We illustrate how incumbents aim to remain indispensable amidst rapid digitization. Mimicking tech strategies, financial incumbents resort to transforming legacy ICT systems into integrated platforms, cultivating entrepreneurial ecosystems where startups are ‘free’ to compete whilst effectively being locked into the incumbent's orbit. We illustrate this by comparing Apple's business features (locking-in developers, customers and state into a hybrid business model based on a synergy between hardware, software and data-driven platform components) with emerging practices in the financial industry. Our analogy suggests that the Appleization of finance might radically transform, yet not undercut the oligopolistic position of financial incumbents.

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.

This article explores some aspects of money as a social relation. Starting from Polanyi, it explores the nature of money as a non-commodity, real commodity, quasi-commodity, and fictitious commodity. The development of credit-debt relations is important in the last respect, especially in market economies where money in the form of coins and banknotes plays a minor role. This argument is developed through some key concepts from Marx concerning money as a fetishised and contradictory social relation, especially his crucial distinction, absent from Polanyi, between money as money and money as capital, each with its own form of fetishism. Attention then turns to Minsky's work on Ponzi finance and what one might describe as cycles of the expansion of easy credit and the scramble for hard cash. This analysis is re-contextualised in terms of financialisation and finance-dominated accumulation, which promote securitisation and the autonomisation of credit money, interest-bearing capital. The article ends with brief reflections on the role of easy credit and hard cash in the surprising survival of neo-liberal economic and political regimes since the North Atlantic Financial Crisis became evident.

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.