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.

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.

The 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.

Starting with a landmark speech by Mark Carney on the ‘Tragedy of the Horizon’ in 2015, 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 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.

The quest for social status is usually considered one of the main drivers of the demand for consumer credit. This article provides a nuanced take on consumer credit by exploring the interaction between consumption, borrowing, and class identity. To do so I pursue a cultural class analysis inspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Drawing from 26 semi-structured interviews, the article has two main findings. First, it shows that people engage in borrowing not only to gain prestige, but also to assert their belongingness to symbolic groups, which embody the values of imagined communities. Second, against the idea that borrowing is undertaken mainly for conspicuous consumption, the article's findings show that middle-income families in Chile borrow to consume ‘ordinary’ goods. Through the consumption of these goods, the Chilean middle classes seek to stabilize their class identities through their life trajectories, thereby achieving a sense of place in a changing environment. These findings lead me to focus on the normalization of credit and the process through which borrowing practices turn consumer goods from wants into needs, ratcheting up the demand for credit. The article argues that this is an overlooked way in which competitive dynamics drive the demand for credit, which is a missing link in the explanation for the rise of household debt.

This article argues that there are parallels between developments in modern science and in art and culture, including the culture of finance, and that these developments can be tracked by a notion of volatility not just as change, but as how change itself has changed. Describing this paradigm shift requires a language that is precise but indeterminate, a language akin to metaphor, understood as figures of volatility. Three such figures are anamorphosis, anachronism, and catachresis. These figures are major instantiations of volatility, though they do not exhaust all the possibilities. What they indicate is not just that our frames of understanding have shifted, but that we are dealing with problematic, multiple, and overlapping frames: anamorphosis problematizes our experience of space, anachronism of time, and catachresis of language. These figures are not all in play at the same time. In literature, catachresis may be the dominant figure; in dance, anamorphosis; in ‘slow cinema’, anachronism. The aim is less to arrive at a set of defining characteristics than to follow a series of transformations across different cultural fields. Almost every field in our time is volatile each in its own way, and this has consequences for methodology. If figures are tools to think with, not to regulate thought, a necessary method would be to allow these figures to emerge from the material, not from a checklist. The question of volatility is arguably the key intellectual challenge of our time because it allows us to see deviation from a norm not just as an aberration, but as an indication that established norms are losing their normative value.

European financial regulation consistently gives governments privileged access to private investors, reflecting the anchor role assigned to sovereign securities as safe and liquid assets for the financial system. Legislative reforms after the financial crisis of 2008 further expanded the preferential treatment of sovereign securities as zero-risk claims, introduced portfolio requirements in favour of public debt, and constrained market speculation against governments. These sovereign privileges appear counterproductive for fiscal discipline and financial stability: they encourage excessive public debt issuance and make financial institutions holding government bonds - in particular from euro area countries with a variable risk profile - vulnerable to fiscal turbulence. Governments seem to have a conflict of interest. On the one hand, they are prudential regulators of financial risk-taking, on the other hand, they tend to overlook the financial sector's exposure to sovereign risk. This article considers four theories of the state-finance nexus and their solutions to this conflict of interest. The money view, the franchise view, and the modern financial repression view draw on the state's monetary and regulatory powers over finance to confirm sovereign safety. Their positions fundamentally contrast with the neoliberal view, which relies on free markets to enforce sustainable public finances. The article concludes that sovereign privileges present a fundamental dilemma for European financial governance with a neoliberal orientation: they oblige private investors to hold public debt, while weakening the role of markets in promoting fiscal discipline as the very foundation of sovereign safety.

This article explores the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of volatility and their implications for cultural analysis in a range of fields. From quantitative finance, it takes the notion of ‘delta-hedging’, the suspension or neutralization of directionality to get access to volatility, and applies this to qualitative areas such as surfing, dance, cinema, and language.

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.

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.

This 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.

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?

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?

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.