Activity

Importantly, Marx makes the key point that a stock or bond is, in essence, a claim on the future surplus value yet to be extracted from labour. In other words, a share in BP may have a price for which it exchanges on the speculative market, but its underlying value is really a claim to a certain sh…

[...] Finance’s goal, according to Lazzarato, is to compel us all to imagine ourselves as “financiers of the self,” and embrace precariousness, risk, and economic and existential insecurity. For Lazarrato, debt and finance operate biopolitically: they are techniques of power whereby both bodies a…

financiers internalize a culture of risk management and are guided by an imagined relation to a highly circumscribed future.

So, similarly, finance may never have a moment when a financial asset accurately and unproblematically refers to a real-world value (whatever that is, and we would have good reason to question anyone who proposed that there is some accurate measure thereof). And, indeed, as we shall discuss, this i…

[...] What do we make of a system where the rise and fall of whole economies appear to hinge on the performative speech acts of central bank chiefs, or on the confidence and credulity of increasingly fickle investors (Marazzi 2008, 13–36); of a system where stock markets are so jittery and interwov…