Authors:Janet Roitman Pages: 1 - 13 Abstract: Platform economies are depicted as the foundation for a new era of economic production. This transpires through the incorporation of digital technologies and algorithmic operations into the heart of economic and financial practices. However, different assumptions are made about the effects of digital platforms depending on geographical location. While digital platforms are approached as inherent to processes of financialization globally, they are reduced to processes of financial inclusion when referencing the ‘Global South’. Analyses of financialization as a one-way-vector – Global North to Global South – overlook the variability, the limits, and responses to financialization. In contrast, a focus on market devices illustrates the specificities of value creation. An example of this is ‘the float’, a form of financial value generated by mobile telecommunication operators, mobile money issuers, and commercial banks in Africa. Through this lens, we see instances of both value subjugation and autonomization, evidence that the fault lines of value production generated by ambiguous market devices are obscured by the Global North/Global South frame. PubDate: 2023-03-22 DOI: 10.2218/finsoc.8089 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 1 (2023)
Authors:Matthias Thiemann, Tim Büttner, Oliver Kessler Pages: 14 - 34 Abstract: Starting with a landmark 2015 speech by Mark Carney on the ‘Tragedy of the Horizon’, climate change entered central banking discourse, causing some of its key convictions to come under new scrutiny. This article traces how initially climate change was firmly embedded in a conventional framework of ‘market completion’ that would allow financial markets to price in the negative externality. Yet, over the course of the last seven years, central banks have repositioned their role regarding this problem, taking on a much more active stance which calls into question the notion of ’market neutrality’. To trace these discursive changes, this article identifies three discursive layers formed around market-based mechanisms, responsible investment and monetary policy. We show that in the unfolding of the debate, the issue of climate change has altered the self-understanding of central bankers and driven them towards a more active stance where they acknowledge that central bankers shape and make, and not only ‘mirror’, market forces. PubDate: 2023-03-22 DOI: 10.2218/finsoc.8090 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 1 (2023)
Authors:Lucia Shimbo, Daniel Sanfelici Pages: 35 - 53 Abstract: International property consultants (IPCs) have become key intermediaries in the globalization of property markets by providing a range of services that generate transparency and comparability in land and property-based investments. While their role in generating standardized information on local markets is well known, what is less is known is how IPCs help turn property into an income-yielding asset in less developed economies. This article investigates the contested diffusion of financialized valuation approaches in São Paulo’s local property market. Through a qualitative inquiry into large IPCs and their main clients in the city, we show that IPCs have promoted valuation approaches that are tailored to the needs of financial market investors, thus affecting key investment decisions taken by diverse actors. Though these financialized techniques have at times clashed with more traditional views of property ownership prevalent in the country, we show that most often they co-exist with long-established valuation techniques that reflect the social and economic circumstances of Brazil’s economy. The socially contingent nature of property valuation raises theoretical issues concerning the complexity of attributing value to fixed capital, as well as several policy issues. PubDate: 2023-03-22 DOI: 10.2218/finsoc.8091 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 1 (2023)
Authors:Amin Samman, Martijn Konings Pages: 58 - 60 Abstract: Neither 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. PubDate: 2023-03-22 DOI: 10.2218/finsoc.8093 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 1 (2023)
Authors:Amin Samman Pages: 58 - 60 Abstract: There is no proper place within economic thought for the void. It appears nowhere in the canonical texts of political economy, let alone the discourse of conventional economics. Yet one cannot shake the sense that it is implied in most if not all financial commentary. At the very least, the void exerts a magnetic pull on a range of related terms in the lexicon. Could it be that through these it grounds the financial imagination in fundamental ways' PubDate: 2023-03-22 DOI: 10.2218/finsoc.8094 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 1 (2023)
Authors:Carolyn Biltoft Pages: 61 - 64 Abstract: In Greek archaic literature and philosophy, Eros, the god of love and desire, has numerous origin stories, which lead to different understandings of his nature. These extend to both orthodox and heterodox texts within the economic canon, whose definitions of interest rearticulate the mythological subtext of desire. What might have happened if the Western world had not discarded the passions in its quest for material progress' PubDate: 2023-03-22 DOI: 10.2218/finsoc.8095 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 1 (2023)
Authors:Susan Zieger Pages: 65 - 68 Abstract: The 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. PubDate: 2023-03-22 DOI: 10.2218/finsoc.8096 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 1 (2023)
Authors:Leah Downey, Stefan Eich Pages: 69 - 72 Abstract: What 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. PubDate: 2023-03-22 DOI: 10.2218/finsoc.8097 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 1 (2023)
Authors:Fabian Muniesa Pages: 73 - 75 Abstract: Financial 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. PubDate: 2023-03-22 DOI: 10.2218/finsoc.8098 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 1 (2023)
Authors:Fabio Vighi Pages: 76 - 79 Abstract: The dominant view among critics of today’s financial economy is that, at one point in its long history, capitalism took the wrong turn, falling victim to greed and corruption. This view is fundamentally flawed. The elementary but disavowed reason for the current dominance of the financial sector is that the social narrative based on labour exploitation has grown impotent. The law of value is artificially kept alive in spite of its vanishing. But how long can such delusion last' PubDate: 2023-03-22 DOI: 10.2218/finsoc.8099 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 1 (2023)
Authors:Martijn Konings Pages: 80 - 83 Abstract: The interface of political economy with arts and literature has become dominated by a particular image: capital’s Grinch-like theft of the future. But this image overlooks the peculiar temporal structure of neoliberalism, which renews its broken promises by making up ever more excuses for the past. Contemporary bailout society requires a form of critique that acknowledges these dynamics, that targets the way capital reconstructs our relationship to the past. PubDate: 2023-03-22 DOI: 10.2218/finsoc.8100 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 1 (2023)
Authors:Geraldine Juárez Pages: 84 - 88 Abstract: Assets 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. PubDate: 2023-03-22 DOI: 10.2218/finsoc.8101 Issue No:Vol. 9, No. 1 (2023)
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