Finance and Society
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Revaluation fantasy
Get PDFFinancial conspiracies today blend together antisemitic tropes and spiritual visions with ideals of political reform and economic salvation. It is tempting to locate such phenomena at the periphery of the financial order, situating them within a delusional space beyond judicious concepts of money, finance, wealth, and value. But is also possible to take paranoid finance as an extreme, radical appropriation of a logic inherent in finance
The sickle and the garlic chives: Volatility in the Chinese stock market
Get PDFThis 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
Asset managers in the everyday
Get PDFGrowing asset manager ownership of housing and infrastructure represents a new way in which the everyday lives of millions of people become bound up in the world of finance. Brett Christophers provides an explanation for this trend and shows why it is likely to continue, in spite of asset managers’ ill-suitedness for stewardship of public goods
Fake goods
Get PDFThe early 2020s commonplace that everything seems unreal is a material truth. Advances in logistics are generating more counterfeits. Blockchain technology promises to help stem the deluge of counterfeit products, but the Blockchain dream also reminds us that logistics is an imperfect performative art. The material good becomes the unreal figure, while airy speculation assumes greater predictability. All that is solid melts into air, but all that is air comes back to the ground
Edges of the financial imagination
Get PDFNeither external nor internal to finance, the financial imagination marks out a space where the theoretical and practical aspects of finance come together in the inner life of the subject. That means there is something about financial subjectivity that escapes a functional view on the imagination. The purpose of this forum is to probe the contours of the financial imagination in terms of its perimeters and blind spots, its fantasies and delusions
Crypto-politics and counterfeit democracy
Get PDFWhat began with an intense bout of crypto fever has since the onset of the pandemic engendered an explosive rise in online retail trading. While the original political promise of financial decentralization has become ever harder to sustain, the idea of democracy as access, including access to highly speculative and gamified investments, continues to capture the financial imagination
Freeze to defrost! Negating the asset form
Get PDFAssets thrive on liquidity but they also enact a freezing of their own, a freezing of the underlying. How can we undo the cold reign of the asset economy? By turning state practices of asset freezing into the basis for a pirate tactic of de-assetization. De-assetization means freezing over the pipes that keep capital circulating; it also means applying heat to the notion that everything in the world can and should be frozen in order to release more liquid flows of cash
Valuing as a social process: Embodiment, relevance, and commensuration
Get PDFIn Inventing Value, Dave Elder-Vass (2022) argues that value is a set of beliefs about items that are strategically propagated to increase profits. The emphasis on value as a social process is particularly welcome, as this is the most fruitful direction for understanding worth. But the book leaves most of the important questions unanswered: who or what creates value, how to distinguish real and fake value, or how value can be best created and redistributed, are all left out of the discussion. A general theory of value remains elusive
Inflating value with other people’s money
Get PDFA one country case study using a historical-institutional balance sheet approach provides a unique vantage point on financialization. By clarifying conceptual distinctions between assets and liabilities in households and banks and representing historical financial data in disaggregated forms, Kurt Mettenheim and Olivier Butzbach offer a significant critical genealogy of the production of money and value in the US
Introduction: Volatility in finance, art, and culture
Get PDFThe term ‘volatility’ applies to changeability: both that which can be measured, such as temperatures and stock prices, and that which cannot be easily measured, such as affects and emotions. Quantitative financial volatility has typically been studied quite separately from art, culture, and everyday life. Randy Martin’s work, which addressed the resonances between volatility in dance and finance, was a notable exception. Martin focused on derivatives, which played a critical role in the development of financialized capitalism, especially between 1973-2008. Arguably, however, derivatives are no longer the key drivers of volatility as a social and cultural logic. New assemblages of asset managers, rentiers, and online platforms – along with a pandemic, new banking crises, and ongoing climate emergency – are reshaping how volatility is produced and navigated. How might we rethink volatility in order to better grasp its changing logics? This introduction unpacks existing debates on volatility in finance, art, and culture, suggesting several directions in which new work in this area might depart from existing frameworks – some of which are pursued in this special issue. We focus on three broad lines of exploration: rethinking the intellectual histories of volatility; rethinking volatility across disparate post-2008 contexts; and imagining volatile futures through art practice