[...] while finance might be a modality of social fiction which functions by telling a performative story about the world, it is a story that is, essentially, almost nonsense: a frenetic jumble of metaphors built on metaphors that never resolve into a coherent or linear narrative. Wealth is generated not by seeing the greater narrative in the market, but by spinning out new metaphors and abandoning them once they have done their work. The system is held together not by internal coherence, but by sheer momentum. Corporate strategy, disciplined by stock markets and financial institutions, is increasingly guided by frantic short-term efforts to secure higher financial returns, rather than by any long-term concept of fiscal sustainability, let alone any commitment to workers or consumers. Government policy, guided by the influence of bond markets, eschews any pretence to long-term planning and seeks largely to manage potential risks to the future profitability of transnational capital. Even individuals, driven increasingly by the dictates of debt or lonely financial acumen in a “liquid” world without guarantees, have difficulty envisioning the future as anything more than the endless continuation of the present (see Žižek 2010). As Jameson (1997) observed over 15 years ago, financialization is part and parcel of a postmodern moment of late capitalism wherein social narrative at all levels has been reduced to a jumble of relationalities.