In his review of my recent book, Abstract Market Theory, Johnson mistakes my investigation into the conditions and limits of probabilistic reasoning as a rejection of its sense and utility. The same misunderstanding also appears in a review by Munger published recently. In both cases this leads to a skewed and reductive understanding of my reconception of the relationship between price and value. In this response, I present an outline of the philosophical goals of Abstract Market Theory. My intent is not just to show that these reviews are incorrect in their presentation of my argument, but to also indicate why a philosophical perspective remains indispensable for our understanding of the market.

Drawing on Judith Butler's concept of injurious speech, this article conceptualises the ‘Grexit’ crisis as a series of performances. More specifically, we investigate how the Greek government framed the bailout plans tabled by the Troika as a form of torture. By adopting phrases such as ‘fiscal water-boarding’, ‘asphyxiation’, and ‘suicide’, the Syriza government sought to narrate the harm inflicted on Greece by its creditors. Paying attention to this language is important as it casts new light on how Greek sovereign debt has been framed, negotiated, and contested. In many ways, the overarching objective of this article is to tell a different story that takes discursive transitivity and restaging into account. By shifting the emphasis onto injurious speech, the article also brings the unintended effects of this language into focus. Despite the recurrent accusations made by Syriza as it attempted to resolve the Greek sovereign debt crisis, this article questions whether their bargaining strategy ‘misfired’. On closer consideration, we find that the injurious speech acts performed by the Syriza government compromised their ability to negotiate a third bailout deal in 2015. The observations remind us that words can wound in ambivalent ways.

In what ways might the digital renminbi (RMB), also known as e-CNY, bolster China’s efforts to internationalize its currency? Utilizing Susan Strange’s concept of currency negotiation and borrowing the concept of infrastructures from science, technology, and society studies, this article argues that RMB internationalization is a gradual process that relies heavily on negotiation involving both state and non-state actors (i.e., private financial authorities). It further argues that while e-CNY may create new opportunities for RMB internationalization, it also raises new challenges. First, the e-CNY’s lack of coordination with other central banks represents a challenge for future evolution and standardization with other digital currency platforms, thus rendering first-mover status a potential disadvantage. Second, as a result of China’s divergent data governance direction from both the US and the EU, the e-CNY is disadvantaged when it comes to interoperability, trust of users, and diversity of data. The purpose of this study is not to predict the future of RMB internationalization once the e-CNY rolls out but rather to highlight various ways in which the latter may influence the former in order to widen analyses of the topic.

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?

This article contributes to an understanding of how real estate financialisation unfolds within a city in the global South, Johannesburg. It firstly shows that compared to what has been witnessed in the global North, real estate financialisation in South Africa is characteristically conservative: market actors do not engage in high-risk, low-income neighbourhoods. Indeed, in Johannesburg, financialisation has displayed minimal interest in residential markets. Instead, financialisation in the city has been driven by commercial property investments, typically in the form of urban enclaves such as securitised office parks, malls, mixed-use developments, and increasingly ‘satellite cities’ built from scratch. This article considers how the selective character of financialisation in the country is mediated by power relations in the global political economy. In particular, it highlights how South Africa’s status as an ‘emerging market’ encourages a prudent lending regime for domestic financial institutions and real estate actors.

In this rejoinder, I discuss three fundamental deadlocks raised by contributors to this forum. These relate to the status of historical discourse, financial market logics, and above all the figure of the ‘strange loop’, which I put forward as a means of reorienting historical thought. I also offer some preliminary remarks on why History in Financial Times departs from conventional forms of historicism in political economy, as well as a further set of reflections on the contemporaneity of the book's argumentation.

Loops make a fitful, but not insignificant appearance in Amin Samman's History in Financial Times. Are we locked into the category of causality by human nature, or would it be possible to invent a new one to give conceptuality to what, in the form of the loop, seems for the moment to be mere figural malaise?

What happens to classic Marxist notions of revolution, exploitation and class struggle under the premise that we live in the age of financial rather than industrial capitalism? In this essay I argue that the logic of finance is the main structuring principle of the circulation of value, capital, and money today. Accordingly, we should no longer just think of class struggle in terms of workers and capitalists but also in terms of debtors and creditors. In financial capitalism class is determined by one's position relative to the production of money. This also means that a contemporary idea of revolution is a matter of radical change in the way that money comes into being.

Fintech is celebrated for its disruptive and democratizing qualities that dis/reintermediates the finance value chain. Claims of a ‘fintech revolution’ assume that fintech is ‘disruptive’ because of its innovative capabilities, but the extent to which these disruptive forces have reconfigured consumer financial knowledge and practices is not well understood. Using a questionnaire to survey retail consumers in Singapore on their use of fintech in performing different financial tasks, this article critically examines these claims of disruption and democratization by grounding them in the financial behaviors of consumers as informed by a financial ecologies approach. The results show a limited impact of fintech in shaping consumer financial behaviors. Respondents use fintech mainly for basic transactional purposes like making mobile payments and account management, but not so much for more complex matters like savings, investing and credit. The findings also reveal a ‘stickiness’ in financial behaviors that emphasizes the high touch points of human interaction. This study illustrates fintech's variegated material outcomes by highlighting the unevenness in consumption of digital financial services and the enduring importance of human relationality in financial decision making.

Money is neither a thing nor a concept. Rather, as many writers have rightly suggested, money is a relation. But what kind of relation? This articles refuses the now seemingly common-sense notion that money is an ‘institution’ or a ‘public good’. Instead, it insists on specifying money as a concrete relation between creditor and debtor. To grasp money in both its practical and conceptual complexity, we must see it as an array. The money array is comprised of four elements: (1) a token that symbolizes the money relation; (2) a creditor who holds the token; (3) a debtor on whom the token makes a claim; (4) a denomination, i.e., the named quantity of credit/debt. The money array makes clear that no form of the money stuff - as money, i.e., as part of the money relation - ever possesses any positive, intrinsic value. The raison d’être of the money stuff - of any coin, note, bill, check, or digital token - is not to contain, have, or incarnate value. Money has no value. The value element of the money relation never lies in the money stuff, but rather can only be located across the entire money array.

This article develops a pragmatic theory of finance in which markets are considered to be centres of communicative action in the face of uncertainty. This contrasts with the conventional approach that portrays markets as centres of strategic action in the face of scarcity. The argument follows Habermas and entails that a financial market must address the truthfulness, truth, and rightness of the statements made by its participants (i.e., the prices quoted). I claim that these discursive norms have been implicit in historical financial markets as expressed in the norms of sincerity, reciprocity, and charity. I conclude by proposing that ‘trust’ in commerce is a synthesis of the three discursive norms. The motivation of the article is to address the crisis of legitimacy that the financial system is experiencing, particularly in the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US).

Sustainable finance is often discussed as a solution to the climate crisis, but its impacts are limited and its discourse focuses on mobilising private investments through public de-risking, without considering direct government action. We argue that this is due to an implicit reference to mainstream economic theory assuming that an active state leads to time inconsistency problems and crowding-out effects. However, these assumptions have been sufficiently refuted as public investments may actually crowd-in private capital. We therefore propose a paradigm shift towards what we call Public Sustainable Finance, aimed at empowering the role of the state in the green transition on the discursive, policy, and political economy levels. Studying the case of Germany, we show how Public Sustainable Finance can be introduced despite tight fiscal regimes. To this end, we propose that the Climate- and Transformation Fund be given its own borrowing powers. By borrowing an average of 23 billion euros annually from 2024 to 2030, the existing financing gap that has been exacerbated following the November 2023 constitutional court ruling can be closed, enabling a more rapid and effective green transition.

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.

This article presents a speculative philosophical account of money as a computational machine. It does so by leveraging a computational and machinic framework, drawing primarily from the work of Philip Mirowski and Jean Cartelier. The argument is focused on a specific level of abstraction, i.e., the monetary operations involved in the creation and transfer of units of account, asking whether it is possible to view these operations as computations that mediate economic relations. As the primary function of such a machine would be one of social coordination, the article also highlights the political consequences of its implementation across society.

Konings successfully mobilizes social theory to demonstrate how various post-Marxist, Polanyian, and Foucauldian analyses fail to make sense of financialization and neoliberal governance as persistent societal formations. In their place he offers an analysis focused on the logic of ‘leverage’, which he sees as a source of not only private gain but also governmental power. I fully endorse Konings' turn to social theory, and in particular to the work of Niklas Luhmann. But I suggest that, since Konings leaves out Luhmann's broader theory of society, he can neither capture the tight couplings between the economy and politics presupposed in neoliberal governance, nor contextualize this governance as a ‘provincial’, US-centred project.

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.

The work of the artist and writer Gerald Nestler explores finance and its social implications since the mid-1990s. Based on his professional experience as a trader as well as on post-disciplinary research, he has developed a unique approach that brings together theory and conversation with installation, video, performance, text, and other art forms. Probing into the narrative structures of contemporary capitalism, Nestler offers a techno-political critique directly from the core of the financial markets. This interview addresses his reading of the derivative as a world-producing apparatus that shapes the experience of the present by preconfiguring the future, and that provokes a shift from representational to performative speech in the actualization of biopower based on the exploitation of volatility and leverage. In conversation with Christian Kloeckner and Stefanie Mueller, he argues for the formation of specific human/non-human alliances that directly attack algorithmic as well as socio-economic black-boxing (schemes that monopolize inherently non-scarce resources), so as to open our imagination to skills and tactics that would allow us to navigate the rich but volatile flows of social, political, and economic abundance.

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.

The documentary film Habilito: Debt for Life provides a case study of the conflicts and tensions that arise at the point of contact between highland migrants and Mosetenes, members of an indigenous community in the Bolivian Amazon.