The 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath provided fertile soil for criticism of and alternatives to the international liberal order, including the rise of financial nationalism. Contemporary financial nationalism is a view of the world that is nationalist in its motivation for political action, financial in its policy focus, and illiberal in its conception of political economy. At the same time, it is fundamentally shaped by its emergence from within the international liberal order, which both constrains the policy options of financial nationalists and provides opportunities for them to draw on transnational financial resources and institutions to advance nationalist causes. This article offers a conceptual analysis of contemporary financial nationalism that explores its fundamental characteristics, explains what is distinctive about it, delineates its four major policy subtypes, identifies the resources and capabilities required to successfully engage in it, and discusses the implications of doing so. It aids researchers in thinking about financial nationalism’s internal workings across different contexts, in understanding why it has lasted as long and spread as far as it has, in considering how it may evolve, and in contemplating how it can affect domestic and international political economies.

In The Rise of Central Banks, Leon Wansleben provides a perceptive account of the evolution of central banking practices in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Switzerland from the 1970s through the subprime mortgage crisis and the global pandemic. Focusing on the concrete practices of monetary policymakers, Wansleben usefully explores the relationship between the development of novel techniques of monetary policy implementation and the financialization of the economy, with the paradox that the central bank appears more powerful, but exercises this power in a system that is ever more prone to crisis. While agreeing with the broad strokes of Wansleben’s analysis, I raise questions about the nature of the ‘infrastructural power’ exercised by the state through financial markets, suggesting that the growing salience of the central bank in the policymaking apparatus should not be conflated with its independent influence over the direction of economic policy.

I use this introduction to the book forum to situate my work within scholarly discussions of relevance to the readers of Finance and Society, thereby indicating how my work advances the broader field. I also provide a brief synopsis of the book’s core findings and offer some ideas on how to think with and beyond the book.

Central banking studies continues to consolidate around common foundations, but points of tension and disagreement persist. In this reply, I discuss three such points raised by contributors to this forum. These relate to the concept of infrastructural power, the significance of financial stability policy, and questions of historiography. I also offer some reflections on future directions for the study of central banks.

Since 2008, we have observed a more prominent role of the state in economic life, with the widespread use of financial tools. Advancing discussions on the financialization of distributional politics, the expansion of financial statecraft as a result of fiscal conflicts, and the fragmentation of state power, this article explores how proliferating financial policies reconfigure the state and its relationship with the economy as well as its democratic foundations. I introduce the concept of financial security states to theorize reactions to mature financialization and its inherent instabilities, which provoke socially structured demands for public stabilization. Leveraging the tradition of fiscal sociology, I work out differences between taxation and welfare systems and those based on financial security. In particular, I show that financial security states exploit value uncertainties to postpone loss-reckoning, are carried by hybrid state-banking institutions, and leverage the states’ endogenous power within market-based finance. This article argues that the by-and-large regressive distributional outcomes and fiscal costs of financial policies remain opaque, due to strategic obfuscation, the failure of traditional modes of political mediation, and deficient budgeting procedures.

The emergence of digital platforms has been viewed in scholarly narratives as a “technological fix” of global capital, to use Beverly Silver's classic term. That is, capital continues to devise innovative strategies to restructure the labour process and avoid employer legal liabilities. This study reveals an important but somewhat overlooked “financial fix” aspect of the platform economy. Through a case study of a Chinese food delivery platform, the author shows that global speculative capital and its cash-burning games have generated a form of market-value fetishism in this sector. In response, platform companies have devised innovative labour acquisition strategies to expand their market share that have profoundly shaped the work and employment dynamics within the sector. In particular, the platform companies engaged in a subsidy rivalry with their competitors in order to attract crowdsourcing/gig workers for their regular services and at the same time established a highly structured subcontracting system to secure a more reliable and committed workforce to target the relatively high-end consumer market. The author argues that the interaction between global financialization and local capital's strategic choices accounts for the peculiar structure and employment dynamics in the Chinese platform economy.

This article brings agency to discussions on financialization and financial education in Sweden by zooming in on two barely examined actors and arenas: civil society and public schools, respectively. The civil society organization Aktiespararna (Swedish Shareholders’ Association, founded in 1966) attempted to access and impact school education starting with its launch of youth efforts in the 1980s. Aktiespararna was joined in these efforts by Unga Aktiesparare (Swedish Young Shareholders’ Association), founded in 1990. This study describes the organizational strategies—tools, techniques, and discursive approaches—to reach Swedish upper-secondary school students. The result shows a crucial transition on how young Swedes were expected to relate to investing in stocks: from a special interest to pursue as either side activity or profession, to an inevitable part of everyday consumer life. The Swedish example is especially illuminating because it is general in its overall development from welfare state to market orientation. Yet, it emerges as distinctive in its pace and character. Apart from the apparent brisk, straightforward march from social-democratic hegemony, and one of the most regulated national economies in the mid-1900s, to a highly marketized and financialized society in the 2000s, Sweden holds a sociocultural history of strong popular movements and civil society associations. The article demonstrates important links between this aspect of collective engagement for individual progress and the financialization process.

How does financialization of the economy impact public governance of natural resources? One way includes a shift in how savings and cash accumulation are understood and practiced within public agencies. This article proffers that in the second half of the twentieth century, it became a taken-for-granted understanding that long-term savings should be held in financial investment accounts instead of traditional savings accounts. As a result of this, municipal organizations act as fiscally independent investors, marshaling economic resources to pursue strategic objectives that align with financialized institutional logics. Using a case study of the largest supplier of drinking water in the US, this article examines how the use of financial investments by a major public resource agency, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, evolved since first establishing an investment policy in the 1940s. Today, this organization maintains investments worth over one billion dollars. Analysis of archival documents suggests that financial activities, even if yielding dwindling returns over time, are counted upon as a source of revenue, deployed to obtain favorable bond ratings, used for access to earmarked funds, and leveraged to acquire land in water-strategic locations. Considering the ubiquity of these financial practices among medium to large-sized municipal governing bodies, the results of this study are suggestive and generalizable across substantive governing fields and in other locations. Ultimately, this study shows that public governance agencies are intertwined with private capital flows, problematizing the oft-assumed distance between public and private actors. The article also interrogates the influence that financial markets have over of public policy, showing that elected governance officials engage in the commodification of money, encouraging the further commodification of environmental resources.

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.

A new literature on housing and financialization has emerged in recent years, but scholars have yet to examine how political actors shape national trajectories of housing financialization. In this article, we address this shortcoming by examining the cases of Russia and Poland in the 1990-2018 period. We argue that in both contexts political elites implemented a radical market-oriented reshaping of housing finance. However, by pursuing distinct statecraft strategies and modes of integrating the domestic economy into global markets, Russian and Polish political elites created two divergent trajectories of housing financialization. Russian political elites pursued patrimonial statecraft strategies and a mode of global economic integration based on raw material exports. The Putin administration channeled revenues from raw material exports into the securitization-based housing finance system and used this infrastructure as an instrument of hegemonic power. In doing so, the Russian government shielded homeowners from exposure to financial risk. In contrast, Polish political elites pursued liberal statecraft strategies and a mode of global economic integration based on foreign capital inflows. Polish political parties therefore enabled foreign banks to dominate the housing finance system and sell foreign currency mortgages, which exposed homeowners to considerable financial risk. In light of these findings we call for further research into the political factors that shape the process of housing financialization, both in the post-socialist space and beyond.

This essay identifies two approaches to theorizing the relationship between financialization and contemporary art. The first departs from an analysis of how market logics in non-financial spheres are being transformed to facilitate financial circulation; the other considers valuation practices in financial markets (and those related to derivative instruments in particular) from a socio-cultural perspective. According to the first approach, the contemporary art market is in theory a hostile environment for financialization, although new practices are emerging that are increasing its integration with the financial sphere. The second approach identifies socio-cultural similarities between the logics by which value is extracted, amplified, and distributed through derivative instruments and contemporary art. The two approaches present a discrepancy: on the one hand, contemporary art functions as an impediment to outright financialization because of market opacity; on the other, contemporary art represents a socio-cultural analog to derivative instruments. The essay concludes by setting out the terms for a more holistic understanding of contemporary art's relationship to financialization, which would enable an integration of its economic and socio-cultural dimensions.

This essay explores the meaning that volatility assumes in the Chinese stock market context. Drawing on discussions from ‘mom and pop’ online forums, it argues investors operate in a relational position with the Chinese state regulators that both sustain and threaten their market activities. Chinese stock markets are known to be the most volatile in the world. To face the state's arbitrary intervention in the market, investors must constantly juggle the options of either leaning on and trusting the regulators’ capacity to protect and rescue their stocks or engaging in risky margin trading and short-selling activities. This contradictory behavior is reflected in the popular self-mocking meme that keeps circulating in investors online forums, the one of the jiucai (meaning ‘garlic chives’). The investors often use it with irony to describe their own tendency to throw cash into the markets again and again, hoping to regain the money they lost in previous investments, never learning a lesson. Linking the financial with the biopolitical dimension, the essay takes the jiucai meme to show the extent to which volatility points to the production of new subjects whose resilience involves the adoption of practices of speculation to conjure a future for themselves that is reborn multiple times.

Platform economies are depicted as the foundation for a new era of economic production. This transpires through the incorporation of digital technologies and algorithmic operations into the heart of economic and financial practices. However, different assumptions are made about the effects of digital platforms depending on geographical location. While digital platforms are approached as inherent to processes of financialization globally, they are reduced to processes of financial inclusion when referencing the ‘Global South’. Analyses of financialization as a one-way-vector - Global North to Global South - overlook the variability, the limits, and responses to financialization. In contrast, a focus on market devices illustrates the specificities of value creation. An example of this is ‘the float’, a form of financial value generated by mobile telecommunication operators, mobile money issuers, and commercial banks in Africa. Through this lens, we see instances of both value subjugation and autonomization, evidence that the fault lines of value production generated by ambiguous market devices are obscured by the Global North/Global South frame.

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.

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.

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.

This article examines the implications of the financialization of social impact and the emerging social impact bonds (SIBs) market for socially engaged art practices. How do SIBs, which allow for investment in social impact metrics, shift the broader contexts through which the value of social impact is understood in art discourses? In the British context, recent projects by Assemble, Open School East and others do important social work, yet echo the logic of the social investment market by outsourcing social impact. Rather than dismissing socially engaged art initiatives as having been recuperated by financialized capitalism, I suggest the need to develop new ways of achieving a double reading of these works as they relate to - and upset the distinctions between - stakeholder and bondholder valuation.

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.