Quantitative easing (QE) has been a favourite tool of central banks in their post-financial crisis monetary policy apparatus. Social science literature has interpreted QE as a shift away from performative governance characterising pre-crisis monetary policy. With reference to the Bank of England’s experience, I offer a reinterpretation of QE as a performative intervention in the conditions of financial markets, as an attempt to alter the state of financial markets away from dysfunctionality and towards efficiency. I claim that, following the financial crisis, the model of complete and efficient markets – a mainstay in central banking prior to the crisis – was transformed from a real-world approximation to a ‘performative object’ to be achieved. In deploying the balance sheet, central banks attempt to performatively enact complete and efficient markets. The article rejects the claim of discontinuity between pre-crisis and post-crisis monetary policy, arguing that QE is a continuation of inflation targeting though with important innovations. While pre-crisis performativity relied on central bankers’ communicative framing of market expectations, QE is performative via the ontological shaping of financial markets, driven by epistemic models. The article relies on a set of 51 interviews with central bankers and financial market participants and a corpus of documents.

Enamoured by gamified FinTech platforms and the rise of investment cultures on social media, young people are turning to financial markets to take control over their future in a present shaped by instability and crisis. Recently, the story of young investors has been dominated by sensationalist accounts of speculative investing (i.e., GameStop). But alongside these speculative traders exists the young passive investor, who steadily invests in safe, diverse assets to grow their wealth over their lifetime. The figure of the passive young investor points to a larger social phenomenon of a maturing asset economy where major assets such as property are out of reach, but financial assets have emerged to allow young people to live an assetised life. To understand why young investors are turning to financial markets as an instrument of wealth accumulation, I argue that these practices emerge as a response to young people’s affective state of precariousness. This precariousness emerges from their material and discursive context that includes a retreating welfare state, wage stagnation, limited employment pathways, and individualised risk management. This affective atmosphere of precariousness pushes young people to seek stability and security wherever they can, and for young investors, this is found in financial assets.

This article explores the puzzling ups and downs of Tesla, going through one the most volatile stock market swings of the recent past, under conditions of financialised capitalism. We adopt a conjunctural approach, highlighting both the macro and micro dynamics shaping the firm’s financial market trajectory. Among these, meticulously maintained narratives, boosted by social media, attracted dedicated followers, while the rise of new retail trading platforms and excitement around Tesla’s index inclusion helped in producing its stock ‘mementum’. This volatility was further supported by an exceptionally large volume of financial derivatives trading, paralleling a public battle between short sellers and the company’s defenders. The resulting stock market boom enabled Tesla to stabilise its finances, whilst its ‘mercurial’ CEO Elon Musk negotiated the largest executive compensation package in US corporate history, turning him into the world’s richest individual. In conclusion, we argue that Tesla serves as an emblematic case of an increasingly tech-driven financialised capitalism, which scholars could use as a window to study future conjunctures.

Since the Paris Agreement, interest in decarbonization and sustainable finance has grown rapidly. Within the prevalent derisking regime, investment for decarbonization must come predominantly from the private sector. However, growth in ‘sustainable finance’ assets is not necessarily causing more sustainability-advancing productive investment to drive the green transition. We thus argue that sustainable finance is not exclusively about investing or providing finance, but crucially also about changing corporate practices toward greater sustainability. To shed light on how private financial actors can influence sustainability in a derisking context and to facilitate this broader research perspective on sustainable finance, we introduce the conceptual framework of ‘channels of influence’. These channels are different strategies and mechanisms used by private actors that influence the behavior of financial and non-financial corporations to increase financial flows to sustainable productive investments. We identify ten channels of influence concerning sustainable finance: (1) initial financing; (2) refinancing; (3) (re)insurance; (4) ratings; (5) climate-litigation; (6) company engagement; (7) divestment; (8) reputation; (9) coalition-building; and (10) standard-setting. These are grouped according to the specificity and breadth of their sustainability impact. Using these channels enables private actors to advance sustainability within the status quo of state-market relations and regulation.

Financial institutions spanning Global North and South are increasingly adopting an agenda of ‘women’s financial inclusion’. The women’s inclusion agenda in finance reflects dynamics of deep marketization that prescribe common economic policy solutions, transcending formerly significant distinctions of geography and social context. In this case, the closing of gender gaps is the universally proscribed policy. Yet this agenda elicits vastly different practices in ‘high’ finance registers where women are recruited as professionals, and microfinance registers where women are incorporated as borrowers. Relating multisited ethnographic materials from a US gender diversity organization and microfinance institutions in India, we ask: on what terms does inclusion take place? First, we examine how gender is constructed across finance institutions by essentializing women as virtuous. These constructions play out according to context-specific gender politics on questions of women’s economic empowerment – concerning neoliberal iterations of feminism in the US case, and financialization of social reproduction in India. Second, what do women’s everyday engagements with the inclusion agenda indicate about the terms of financial inclusion? Women contend with characterizations of themselves as risk-averse professionals and responsible borrowers, respectively, with ambivalence. Their contextually located ambivalent responses are points of both leverage and critique for the financial inclusion agenda.

Amidst the global ascent of financial technologies (FinTech), Argentina presents a critical case for examining how these platforms shape debt relations among marginalized households. Employing a mixed-methods approach, this article draws on quantitative data from the Central Bank of the Republic of Argentina and the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses, alongside qualitative findings from a case study conducted in Buenos Aires’ largest slum. The article conceptualizes FinTech as an integral part of the lower tiers of the credit market, functioning as a mechanism for extending debt. The findings reveal that FinTech platforms do not displace existing credit sources but instead operate alongside them, providing new channels for debt that deepen financial dependence. FinTech’s role in marginalized communities, therefore, is less about banking the unbanked and more about reconfiguring access to unsecured debt, allowing for immediate consumption amidst financial instability. The article in this way contributes to the literature on FinTech by offering an understanding of FinTech’s embeddedness in everyday financial practices, showing how marginalized users engage with FinTech as a tactical response to their socio-economic conditions, exercising agency within constrained circumstances shaped by debt and financial precarity.

This essay examines the contemporary discourse on inflation through the lens of Wittgenstein’s late work on language games. Using his concept of hinge propositions – beliefs upon which language games depend – I offer a novel perspective on the public good that is price stability. In particular, I first consider the inflation hypothesis as a derivative of the commodity theory of money and therefore inherently linked to a purely quantitative regime of monetary management. I then argue that, based on the hinge proposition that money is a creature of law, money’s value might instead be grasped and engaged on the basis of its political and qualitative dimensions.

An idée fixe of Great Moderation economic policy was that central banks are only effective macroeconomic managers when they are segregated from electoral politics. That idea made a swift transition from radical heterodoxy to commonsensical orthodoxy during the 1980s and proved remarkably resistant to reality during the 2008 financial crisis. After almost twenty years of ‘unconventional’ monetary policy, scholars, policymakers, and politicians are justifiably searching for more credible ways to conceptualise and use the nation-state’s monetary authority. Two recent books provide vital energy for that intellectual exercise. Éric Monnet’s Balance of Power is a bold re-conceptualisation of monetary authority as a welfare-state support in liberal democracies. In addition to dissipating the illusion that central banks are simply interest-rate-setting inflation-fighters, Monnet presents a systematic argument for integrating them into a web of deliberative institutions (including public development banks and economically empowered parliaments) to bolster the legitimacy and effectiveness of monetary policy. Relatedly, Manuella Moschella’s Unexpected Revolutionaries attacks the idea that central bankers are responsive only to technocratic doctrine and private-market behaviour, showing how monetary authorities sculpt policies to bolster their reputation with political actors. Paying close reference to private-market liquidity guarantees and quantitative easing, Moschella maps the fortunes of unconventional policy in alignment with political support for financial-market backstops and exceptional economic stimulus. Both books provoke readers to jettison the anodyne generalities of central banks’ own glossy pamphlets and think afresh about the possibilities of economic policy’s new normality.