[...] Actual markets do not work that way. They do not work mysteriously by themselves, or ‘clear’ at their optimum point. Only by bracketing-out the relative wealth of buyer and seller can they be called ‘fair’. No ‘hidden hand’ guarantees the common good. Markets often require the external power of state and law to establish and regulate them. But the discourse provides subjects with a ‘lived’ ‘imaginary relation’ to their real conditions of existence. This does not mean that markets are simply manufactured fictions. Indeed, they are only too real! They are ‘false’ because they offer partial explanations as an account of whole processes. But it is worth remembering that ‘those things which we believe to be true are “real” in their consequences’.