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.

In his review of my recent book, Abstract Market Theory, Johnson mistakes my investigation into the conditions and limits of probabilistic reasoning as a rejection of its sense and utility. The same misunderstanding also appears in a review by Munger published recently. In both cases this leads to a skewed and reductive understanding of my reconception of the relationship between price and value. In this response, I present an outline of the philosophical goals of Abstract Market Theory. My intent is not just to show that these reviews are incorrect in their presentation of my argument, but to also indicate why a philosophical perspective remains indispensable for our understanding of the market.

Mainstream economics must be conceived of as a sort of ‘dangerous’ knowledge – because its models (like the idea of efficient markets) offer no explanation for the regularity of crises and crashes in financial markets in the last decades; and because these models were also employed in the implementation and justification of these very markets. Just as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 once shook modern theodicy to its foundations, so the financial tremors of the last twenty years threaten to undermine the scientific status of economic theory. What is at issue is nothing less than the validity, possibility, and tenability of a liberal or capitalist oikodicy, a theodicy of the economic universe. It is likely that we are dealing here with one of the greatest and most fatal of errors of modern economics.

Drawing on Judith Butler's concept of injurious speech, this article conceptualises the ‘Grexit’ crisis as a series of performances. More specifically, we investigate how the Greek government framed the bailout plans tabled by the Troika as a form of torture. By adopting phrases such as ‘fiscal water-boarding’, ‘asphyxiation’, and ‘suicide’, the Syriza government sought to narrate the harm inflicted on Greece by its creditors. Paying attention to this language is important as it casts new light on how Greek sovereign debt has been framed, negotiated, and contested. In many ways, the overarching objective of this article is to tell a different story that takes discursive transitivity and restaging into account. By shifting the emphasis onto injurious speech, the article also brings the unintended effects of this language into focus. Despite the recurrent accusations made by Syriza as it attempted to resolve the Greek sovereign debt crisis, this article questions whether their bargaining strategy ‘misfired’. On closer consideration, we find that the injurious speech acts performed by the Syriza government compromised their ability to negotiate a third bailout deal in 2015. The observations remind us that words can wound in ambivalent ways.

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?

While FinTech gets promoted as an innovative and progressive solution to meeting financial needs globally, it is afflicted by pervasive gender inequalities, only recently noticed in research. To explore these gender inequalities at the core of FinTech, we use a mixed-methods approach, combining data on 100 leading FinTech firms and 15 interviews with FinTech professionals, collected in the latter half of 2021. We argue that women in FinTech face the ‘triple glass ceiling’ at the intersection of financial, technological, and entrepreneurial gender inequalities. Our sample shows that women account for only 7.69% of (co-)founders, 18.2% of executive committee members, and merely 4.04% of FinTech companies are led by a woman. Gendered stereotypes and a privileging of masculine performances produce significant barriers to women entering and progressing within FinTech. Discriminatory practices are overt and implicit, everyday and exceptional, micro and acute. Shattering the ‘triple glass ceiling’ in FinTech represents an immense challenge.

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.

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?

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 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.

This article contributes to an understanding of how real estate financialisation unfolds within a city in the global South, Johannesburg. It firstly shows that compared to what has been witnessed in the global North, real estate financialisation in South Africa is characteristically conservative: market actors do not engage in high-risk, low-income neighbourhoods. Indeed, in Johannesburg, financialisation has displayed minimal interest in residential markets. Instead, financialisation in the city has been driven by commercial property investments, typically in the form of urban enclaves such as securitised office parks, malls, mixed-use developments, and increasingly ‘satellite cities’ built from scratch. This article considers how the selective character of financialisation in the country is mediated by power relations in the global political economy. In particular, it highlights how South Africa’s status as an ‘emerging market’ encourages a prudent lending regime for domestic financial institutions and real estate actors.

Leon Wansleben’s new book, The Rise of Central Banks, explains how central banks have emerged as powerful monetary governors over the past half-century. Yet the book’s recognition that central banks cannot extricate themselves from quantitative easing and market bailouts begs the question: what does it mean for central banks to be dominant but captive? In this commentary, I identify the book’s ambiguities with the concept of infrastructural power the book draws from Michael Mann. Unless the dynamics of state-market interdependence are well specified, giving due attention to the sources of both public and private power, it is unclear what kind of agency central bankers are exercising if they lack sufficient autonomy to act in the public interest.

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.

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).

Money is neither a thing nor a concept. Rather, as many writers have rightly suggested, money is a relation. But what kind of relation? This articles refuses the now seemingly common-sense notion that money is an ‘institution’ or a ‘public good’. Instead, it insists on specifying money as a concrete relation between creditor and debtor. To grasp money in both its practical and conceptual complexity, we must see it as an array. The money array is comprised of four elements: (1) a token that symbolizes the money relation; (2) a creditor who holds the token; (3) a debtor on whom the token makes a claim; (4) a denomination, i.e., the named quantity of credit/debt. The money array makes clear that no form of the money stuff - as money, i.e., as part of the money relation - ever possesses any positive, intrinsic value. The raison d’être of the money stuff - of any coin, note, bill, check, or digital token - is not to contain, have, or incarnate value. Money has no value. The value element of the money relation never lies in the money stuff, but rather can only be located across the entire money array.

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.

In this essay, I argue that Christophers’ description of asset-manager society is best characterized by a logic of ‘acquire and extract’. I build on his insights to delve into the less-explored world of emancipatory alternatives. I argue for radical transformations – what I term ‘democratic ruptures’ – that shift the investment logic of asset managers toward one of ‘build and nourish’. With insights from the failure to establish economic democracy over large pools of finance by unions in the postwar period, I argue that the crucial missing ingredient in the social and ecological disaster of asset-manager society today is democracy. I conclude with a radical reimagining of financial democracy for the twenty-first century.

The early 2020s commonplace that everything seems unreal is a material truth. Advances in logistics are generating more counterfeits. Blockchain technology promises to help stem the deluge of counterfeit products, but the Blockchain dream also reminds us that logistics is an imperfect performative art. The material good becomes the unreal figure, while airy speculation assumes greater predictability. All that is solid melts into air, but all that is air comes back to the ground.