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 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 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.

Modern corporations have increasingly been adopting a decentred, layered, and multi-jurisdictional form as a strategy of boundary manipulation known amongst tax lawyers and accountants as ‘regulatory arbitrage’. The argument we put forward in this article is that the scholarly work that treats these strategies as mere tax avoidance practices has contributed to an underestimation and misrecognition of the way contemporary multinationals operate in markets. These strategies, which we explain in terms of arbitrage power, exploit the difference between exchanges in an imaginary ‘smooth’ market of the economic textbook and a global market that is divided among legal authorities, each imposing their own rules, regulations, and taxations. Arbitrage power exploits differences between the location of market exchange and the location of the registration of property title transfers, combining this with a manipulation of formal systems for recognizing business enterprises in order to escape some or all of the rules and regulations of society. The result is a marked difference between the ‘brochure multinational’, the way multinationals are seen and presented in their glossy brochures, and the way multinationals are legally and practically organized nowadays.

Fintech is celebrated for its disruptive and democratizing qualities that dis/reintermediates the finance value chain. Claims of a ‘fintech revolution’ assume that fintech is ‘disruptive’ because of its innovative capabilities, but the extent to which these disruptive forces have reconfigured consumer financial knowledge and practices is not well understood. Using a questionnaire to survey retail consumers in Singapore on their use of fintech in performing different financial tasks, this article critically examines these claims of disruption and democratization by grounding them in the financial behaviors of consumers as informed by a financial ecologies approach. The results show a limited impact of fintech in shaping consumer financial behaviors. Respondents use fintech mainly for basic transactional purposes like making mobile payments and account management, but not so much for more complex matters like savings, investing and credit. The findings also reveal a ‘stickiness’ in financial behaviors that emphasizes the high touch points of human interaction. This study illustrates fintech's variegated material outcomes by highlighting the unevenness in consumption of digital financial services and the enduring importance of human relationality in financial decision making.

Recently parallels have been drawn between Bitcoin and Yapese stone money. This article focuses on Fitzpatrick and McKeon's (2019) exploration of similarities and differences. The analogy between Bitcoin and Yapese stone money is based on proposed commonalities that are inaccurate, ill-defined, and/or trivial. However, this does not signal a need to refine the comparison, but rather a need to reconsider the rationale for attempting it in the first place. Recent attempts to redefine Yapese stone money using terminology from the field of cryptocurrency reproduces a longer textual history in which writers from the Global North have misrepresented Yap for pedagogic or polemic convenience. Examples include works by William Furness III, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, and influential macroeconomics textbooks, such as N. Gregory Mankiw's Macroeconomics. This history features frequent colonialist tropes of Yap as well as the erasure of histories of colonial violence and power. More caution should be exercised in the study and pedagogic use of Yapese economic cultures, and greater effort should be made to center Yapese voices, acknowledge colonial contexts, and reflect positionality and uncertainty.

Tokyo is conspicuous for its now decades-long absence in the headlines of global financial news. In this article, we revisit the evolution of Tokyo as an international financial centre through the lens of Global Financial Networks (GFN). Drawing on insights from high-level interviews, we present a chronology of Japan's financial history between 1980 and 2020. This reveals a pattern wherein financial sector reforms and financial centre initiatives are repeatedly interrupted by crises. The GFN framework helps to demonstrate how structure and agency intertwine at the global, national, and local scales to shape this reform-boosterismcrisis cycle. Nationally and locally, we find that despite repeated attempts by coalitions of actors to elevate the status of Tokyo, engrained cultural and political economic conditions have hindered its development into a truly global financial centre. Globally, these conditions have been structured and amplified by Japan's historical position as a rule-taker in the governance of international finance. These factors have conspired to situate Japan on the periphery of the GFN, a position aggravated by the rising financial power of China.

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.

This review essay looks at the plurality of research conducted today in the sociology of financial markets by examining a pioneering and little-known study - the PhD thesis of Ira Oscar Glick. It is indeed possible to find in this 1957 thesis some insights that are later solidified by several contemporary lines of research in the sociology of financial markets (new economic sociology, science and technology studies, gender studies, Bourdieusian sociology, ethnomethodology, the economics of conventions). This rediscovery of a key author in the history of the field may lead us to reconsider his legacy and delve into a landmark work that potentially still harbors unexplored insights capable of opening up new avenues for research.

In the last decade, remittances have become connected to financialization, expanding financial markets and deepening financial logics in what has been termed the financialization of remittances (FOR). In Nepal, where remittances are of key importance, this manifests itself in the country's development strategy through attempts to formalize remittances and promote financial inclusion, entrepreneurship, and financial infrastructure. This article focuses on the most salient manifestation of the FOR in Nepal: a large-scale financial literacy education (FLE) campaign for transnational families. To examine how this FOR-FLE complex works, we bring together insights on emotional governance with those on the creation of (gendered) financial subjectivities. Based on an analysis of FLE pedagogical material and interviews with FLE experts, we suggest that the FOR-FLE complex in Nepal mobilizes a pedagogy of fear and hope to discipline the financial behavior of transnational families, transforming them into self-governing miniature financial corporations. We also highlight the gender dimensions of this emotional regime, which creates terror and works to patronize, shame, and stigmatize nonmigrant women of transnational families, rendering them responsible for development, decreasing out-migration, and reducing the economy's import dependency.

Infrastructure in several economies in the Global South has rapidly undergone financialization, aided and abetted by governments opening-up their infrastructure assets to global institutional investors in search of stable, predictable revenue streams. This account of financialization could be the end of the story were it not for the fact that Christophers (2015) and others have shown that institutional investors are not simply in the game of ‘finding’ value or ‘harvesting it’ from obliging states, rather they actively construct it. What often catches the eye, however, are the more overt forms of financial engineering (Ashton et al., 2012), whereas what tends to go unnoticed are the ways in which infrastructure assets are routinely ‘worked’ to generate value over time. Here, we draw attention to a slower-paced financialization of infrastructure assets where, following Chiapello (2015, 2020), investors are engaged in a continual process of evaluation and revaluation of their assets to add value over and above prevailing benchmarks. Taking the example of Canada's Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP) and its extensive investments in Chilean water infrastructure, this article considers how a global investment fund draws on financial practices developed in the advanced economies to add value to long term infrastructure assets in the Global South. Such practices, we argue, enact a routine form of financial subordination which does not match the familiar image of wholly subservient and dominated dependent economies. Rather, the power asymmetries involved equate less to a zero-sum game and more to a game where the benefits are unequally shared between asset managers in the Global North and states in the Global South, where effectively the latter cooperate in their own submission in ways that are not always acknowledged as such.