For some decades now, progressively minded social scientists have argued that markets are too important to leave to economists — indeed, entire new subfields have formed in response to this concern. But this engagement with economic life has often been somewhat half-hearted. Particularly telling in this respect is the fact that these new fields have organized themselves centrally around the rejection of ‘economism’ — the idea that markets have self-regulatory properties. Scholars in fields such as political economy and economic sociology have devoted a great deal of energy to normative critiques of the market, but they have displayed much less interest in rethinking the core categories and principles of economic life itself. What the books considered here have in common, and what sets them apart from established ways of thinking, is a willingness to tarry with the paradoxes of money.

How do applications of emergent technologies contribute to the social legitimacy of finance? To address this question, we examine a set of technologies that have received increasing industry, media, and scholarly attention over the past decade: blockchains. Harnessing the concepts of ‘moral economy’ and ‘scandal’, we identify both possibilities and limits for blockchain applications to legitimate a range of monetary and investment activities. However, we also find that a persistent individualisation of responsibility for failures and shortcomings with ‘live’ blockchain experimentation has undermined the potentially legitimating aspects of this technology. Combining a reliance on technological fixes with a persistent individualist moral economy, we conclude, works against efforts to confront head-on the tensions underpinning the on-going legitimacy crises facing finance.

While institutional frameworks are the dominant approach to analysing the geography of finance, this article focuses on how individual policymakers influence the characteristics of financial institutions and set, or even alter, financial centre development. The historical narratives from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) that this article presents reveal postsocialist reformers’ contrasting philosophies and approaches, despite their shared goals of market liberalisation and European integration. These reforms (or lack thereof) differentiated the securities markets in Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest, especially with respect to financial intermediary mechanisms. Although the legacies of such reforms continue to shape an uneven landscape of financial centres in CEE, this article proposes reformer-centred narratives as an alternative to deterministic institutional thinking. The article argues that historical narratives that foreground the actions and ideas of key policymakers need to be included in the observation framework of financial centre development, in a similar way to how scholars analyse foreign policy by focusing on the heads of governments and ministers.

The UK student loans system is in crisis and the government plans to sell off student loans to corporate purchasers. Such loan sales disadvantage government, the taxpayer and student borrowers. The government should give student borrowers the ‘right to buy’ their own loans for the same price the government is prepared to sell those loans to corporate purchasers. If borrowers purchased their own loans, disadvantages of loan sales would transform into advantages. The ‘right to buy’ can fairly be extended to all borrowers, regardless of whether their loans are being sold; this is done by extending the ‘right to buy’ as a ‘right to reduce’ student loans. The ‘right to reduce’ also provides a solution to the problem of how to ‘deal with’ existing student debt. Because the ‘right to buy’ and the ‘right to reduce’ both follow government's pricing for loan sales, they should be universally acceptable; moreover, government, taxpayers and borrowers would be better off.

In this essay, I examine and discuss the relationship between the market and the masses in light of recent retail-driven surges in the stock prices of firms like GameStop and AMC. Using two historical snapshots, I draw out similarities and differences between the way the collective power and rationality (or lack thereof) of the masses was portrayed in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century market literature and in recent debates about retail investor inclusion and social media or social trading platform-driven market volatility. The main difference between the historical discourse and the present situation is that the new digital market-expanding technologies enable effective retail investor mobilization and thus, increase the retail swarms’ market-moving powers, which were previously less agile and forceful. However, eased and widened market access also transforms digital life into alternative data that is subjected to age-old strategies of market exploitation.

Former US president George W. Bush's idea of the United States as an ‘ownership society’ can be considered as the rhetorical apex of a conservative, libertarian push for a more market-driven restructuring of American social institutions. Reformers in the Bush administration particularly targeted Social Security, a popular American institution and signature achievement of the New Deal era, aiming to replace a system of solidarity with one of individual responsibility and partial privatization. Returning to the time of the early 2000s, this article analyzes the rhetoric of the ownership society as a libertarian utopian social vision - a future, more perfect community the United States should aspire to grow into. It argues that the political discourse on Social Security propagated by the Bush administration relied on rhetorical strategies characterized by an engagement of temporalities. On the one hand, ownership discourse invoked the nation's past achievements and traditional values secured during the American Revolution and guaranteed in the nation's founding documents. On the other hand, the administration framed the alleged urgency of the reforms by making projections about the future and using these to raise questions about the present system of Social Security provision. In this way, earlier debates over Social Security reform provide a valuable perspective on the contemporary nexus of finance and temporality.

In his campus novel Nice Work, David Lodge points to a certain affinity between the practice and rhetoric of high finance and the theoretical discourses central to the study of literature. From this point of view, and as, myself, a literary scholar who has tried to find ways to bring my own disciplinary training to bear on financial and economic topics, I am especially struck, in reading these four outstanding new books, by the strong element of ‘literarity’ that each displays – meaning not simply or necessarily a concern with literature as such, but with the problematics of language, rhetoric, narrative, metaphor, and semiosis that the study of literature opens out upon.

This article discusses the rise of modern banking, the invention of credit and a related persistent orientation to the future inherent in credit-based economies, through the example of the novel which, as a literary form, came into being at roughly the same time. As a distinctly commercial genre and as a product of the financial revolution, novels ask readers to ‘credit’ the stories they tell with truthfulness, and to invest them with a particular form of credibility as significant narratives. At the same time, novels invite readers to imagine ‘as if’ scenarios and possible worlds in much the same way that borrowed capital enables people to construct life worlds based on resources not yet realised through investment in a speculative economy. Therefore, by examining how finance and gambling debts circulate in one particular text from the eighteenth century - Francis Burney's Cecilia - as a primary example of how credit and fictionalisation grew up together, this article argues that credit and risk feed into the narrative accounting and recounting of the text and articulate the affective structure of the financialised future that we have now inherited, and which informs how we understand ourselves as subjects, as well as how we interact with finance as a form of entertainment.

This article presents a speculative philosophical account of money as a computational machine. It does so by leveraging a computational and machinic framework, drawing primarily from the work of Philip Mirowski and Jean Cartelier. The argument is focused on a specific level of abstraction, i.e., the monetary operations involved in the creation and transfer of units of account, asking whether it is possible to view these operations as computations that mediate economic relations. As the primary function of such a machine would be one of social coordination, the article also highlights the political consequences of its implementation across society.

What is the contemporary relation between finance and security? This essay encourages further research into the securitization of finance by developing the notion of ‘finance/security/life’. A focus on the intersections of finance/security/life will be shown to prompt a broadened range of critical, cross-disciplinary concerns with the various ways in which financial markets are positioned as vital to securing wealth, welfare and wellbeing.

To apply the term ‘magical’ to modern economic thought is to suggest that there remains within it an unassimilated and unexamined residue of irrational thought. Further, it is to hold that this remnant persists despite the discipline's century long attempt to create a ‘pure’ form of economic science. The specific instance of irrationality to which we refer is perfectly visible but systematically overlooked because it exists in economics' most basic assumptions: not only the assumptions about the causal mechanisms that determine human action, but even more in what is increasingly acknowledged to be the theoretical Achilles heel of economics, the concept of the market itself.

Clare McAndrew is a leading analyst of the global art market. Here the guest editors of this special issue interview McAndrew on the structures of the art market, its sectorial and regional arrangements, and transformations in its historical, technical, and monetary operation. Their discussion highlights the rapid increase in prices for art and the global extension of the art market since the early-to-mid 2000s, as well as further changes to its operation wrought by the rise of online trading in the early 2010s.

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.

This article explores the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of volatility and their implications for cultural analysis in a range of fields. From quantitative finance, it takes the notion of ‘delta-hedging’, the suspension or neutralization of directionality to get access to volatility, and applies this to qualitative areas such as surfing, dance, cinema, and language.

What began with an intense bout of crypto fever has since the onset of the pandemic engendered an explosive rise in online retail trading. While the original political promise of financial decentralization has become ever harder to sustain, the idea of democracy as access, including access to highly speculative and gamified investments, continues to capture the financial imagination.

When and how did the laundering of ‘dirty’ money become an object of public concern, debate, and ultimately policy at the intersection of finance and security? This article sheds light on the social construction of money laundering as a public problem in the context of the U.S. War on Drugs during the 1970s and 1980s. By doing so, the article also stresses the heuristic value of questioning the finance-security nexus through an analytics of public problems. Its aims are to: (1) avoid interdisciplinary debates around the finance-security nexus becoming trapped in a zero-sum game between the ‘securitization of finance’ and the ‘financialization of security’; and (2) understand better the emergence, re-configuration, and internal tensions of social spaces at the interface of finance and security.

As the subtitle of her new book suggests, Mazzucato aims to distinguish value creators from value extractors. This distinction between making and taking, between earning and deserving, between rent-seeking and value-contributing, is posited as crucial, yet it can no longer be made from within the paradigm of neoclassical economics, which has defined the distinction out of existence. Mazzucato shows this was not always so: classical economists did make the distinction, as did preceding economic schools such as the Physiocrats. This, however, is not a purely intellectual exercise; Mazzucato seeks to influence public debate, stating that “only by debunking ideas about value … can a long-lasting solution be found” (213), the problem being that what the financial sector, pharmaceutical companies, and national account statisticians call ‘value creation’ is in fact typically the opposite.

How do private equity firms decide on a fair price for a business? Drawing on 76 semi-structured interviews, this article contributes to the sociology of finance and valuation studies by showing that pricing companies is not just a valuation operation but also a capital-repartition issue. In so doing, it shows how concrete, local pricing methods contribute to the financialisation of the economy through the creation of a new capital accumulation centre. The article's ethno-accounting approach describes three pricing steps: first, the capital access rules applicable to the private equity firm members (the price rationale); second, the expectations about the capital that can be transferred from the business to the private equity firm (the theoretical price level); and third, the transaction participant coordination mechanisms (culminating in the actual price). This description of the practices and concepts inherent in business valuation sidesteps the traditional divide between price formation in constructivist concepts of value as well as price discovery in substantivist concepts of value. Instead, value is defined as the expectation of a transfer of capital from the productive sphere to the private equity firm.