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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…

[...] Louis Althusser (2014) spoke of ideology as an imaginary relationship to the realities in which we live, a false cohesive worldview that covers over the inherently partial, fractured and contradictory nature of our consciousness. In this sense, ideology is not some passively received, generic…

[...] we take up Marx’s (1981, 594–652) notion of fictitious capital in a way he probably did not fully intend it: capital’s reproduction depends on and transforms the social fictions that animate society. Financial wealth may be largely “fictitious,” but that does not make it any less “real”: as…

Perhaps the most terrifying feature of financialization is that there is no one steering the ship; there is no grand conspiracy, though its operations do depend on lesser conspiracies. Rather, I want to understand financialization as a means by which social agency (at both the highest echelons of t…