In our 2018 film, A Modest Proposal, we proposed to financialize the assets of public museums, their collections, and buildings, and distribute the generated values for the benefit of the producers of those values: the artist community. Reality seems to have caught up with our proposal. In the wake of the pandemic, public museums started to sell NFTs of their master pieces. But this did not inspire any new form of mutualization. In this text, we question whether blockchain infrastructures can be considered a public good. The individualistic logics that pervade the crypto sphere consider human relations in transactional terms and the enforcement of property rights as the only valuable governance principle, defining property as the basis for representation in many of the Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). The trust placed in automated processes might lead to ‘governance by algorithms’, making the ‘Leviathan’, the sovereign machine, a frightening possibility. Other blockchain infrastructures may offer more inclusive alternatives. Distributed Cooperative Organizations (DisCOs) acknowledge the need for the individual to sustain her/himself and yet also create a solidarity economy by the mutual distribution of collectively generated values among all contributors. We focus on the above questions on property, public goods and governance using our home in Brussels, which we have defined as an artwork and framing device. It is the ‘house as artwork’ that helps us evaluate how these concepts play out in an accelerating world in which blockchain and other technologies might equally generate emancipation or new enclosures.

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.

Stephen Dunne recently sat down with Ole Bjerg to chair a discussion about his new book Making Money: The Philosophy of Crisis Capitalism (Verso, 2014). We publish an elaborated version of the book's concluding chapter - ‘Life after Debt’ - within this special issue. This interview and question and answer session puts Ole's argument there, as well as the arguments of his book more generally, into a broader context.

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.

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.

Traditional societies were defined by a prevalence of the past in the definition of the present. United States (US) society seems to show the opposite trend: the present is defined as the preparation of the future. Financial temporality can be seen as an example of the present use of the future, transforming future possibilities into available wealth. As the financial crisis has shown, however, the temporality of the future is more complex and circular. This article deals with quantitative easing (QE) as a financial instrument with an essentially temporal nature (in the sense that it uses time and acts on the future and on expectations). The success of QE in the US economy reveals essential aspects of US temporality, but also raises questions as to how it may differ from European temporality. The analysis of QE measures and their impact also offers ways to assess whether and by which means politics can intervene into finance, as well as what consequences and uncertainties are created in the process.

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?

Financial conspiracies today blend together antisemitic tropes and spiritual visions with ideals of political reform and economic salvation. It is tempting to locate such phenomena at the periphery of the financial order, situating them within a delusional space beyond judicious concepts of money, finance, wealth, and value. But is also possible to take paranoid finance as an extreme, radical appropriation of a logic inherent in finance.

The dominant view among critics of today's financial economy is that, at one point in its long history, capitalism took the wrong turn, falling victim to greed and corruption. This view is fundamentally flawed. The elementary but disavowed reason for the current dominance of the financial sector is that the social narrative based on labour exploitation has grown impotent. The law of value is artificially kept alive in spite of its vanishing. But how long can such delusion last?

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.

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.

In Greek archaic literature and philosophy, Eros, the god of love and desire, has numerous origin stories, which lead to different understandings of his nature. These extend to both orthodox and heterodox texts within the economic canon, whose definitions of interest rearticulate the mythological subtext of desire. What might have happened if the Western world had not discarded the passions in its quest for material progress?

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.

Finance is not something separate from society. It is neither a Marxian superstructure nor a monetarist veil, but rather the very substance of modern social relations, a web of time-dated promises to pay that stretches from now into the future, and from here around the globe. Financial relationships are not about mediating something else on the ‘real’ side of the economy; they are the constitutive relationships of the whole system. Financial globalization and global financialization have produced a global Financial Society, hierarchical and inherently unstable. The problem confronting social analysts is not so much to find the social in the money grid - the money grid is already social - but rather to understand the dynamical operations of that grid on its own terms. This essay sketches the fundamental processes that produce and reproduce Financial Society - settlement and market-making - as an attempt to provide a realistic point of departure for any feasible project of reform.

Digital credit scoring is driving a number of significant transformations in Chinese economy and society, catalyzing financial liberalization, deepening financial inclusion, and shifting economic power beyond the previously state-controlled commercial banking system. Yet the significance of financial technology is informed in turn by locally specific traditions of governance and regulation. This article critically interrogates the rise of Chinese fintech, reconceptualizing it as a process of financialization that is embedded in a Chinese systems-oriented authoritarian governance tradition. On the basis of documentary sources, Chinese-language secondary literature, and fieldwork conducted from 2016-18, it argues that in addition to disrupting existing practices of financial intermediation, the emergence of novel digital credit scoring technologies is enabling new forms of algorithmic governance to be exercised over the process of financialization, which in turn represents an important component in the construction of China's neo-statist authoritarian capitalism. These findings have broader implications for how we understand the importance of new financial technologies in an era of big data, contributing to contemporary debates in international political economy, economic sociology, and Chinese studies.

This article examines different ways in which finance models have become the ruling mode of spatializing relationships, arguing that the ongoing convergence of economic and spatial investment has transformed our environments into heavily contested ‘financescapes’. First, it reflects upon architecture's capacity to give both material and symbolic form to these processes and considers the impacts this has on the emergence of novel kinds of urban investment frontiers, including luxury brand real estate, free zones, private cities, and urban innovation hubs. Focusing on speculative urban developments in Morocco and the United Arab Emirates, the article then highlights the performative dimension of such building programs: how architectural capital is put to work by actively performing the frontiers of future development. Physically staking out future financial gains, this mode of operation is today becoming increasingly manifested in urban crowdfunding schemes. We argue that, far from promoting new models of civic participation, such schemes are functioning as a testbed for speculation around new patterns of spatial production in which architecture acts less as the flagstaff of capital than as a capital system in itself.

Finance and financialization have dominated scholarship on capitalism and society for the past decade. Although scholars noted early on that the expansion of finance relies on the creation (and trade) of new financial assets, assets and assetization have been a blind spot as scholarship continued to focus on financial markets (Langley, 2020). This, however, is currently about to change as a number of landmark publications have been published in the past months that point toward growing momentum in the field of asset and assetization research. In this short essay, I review Kean Birch and Fabian Muniesa's edited collection, Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism, which is of central importance to said momentum, and put it into dialogue with some of the other recent publications on this topic.