This article explores the puzzling ups and downs of Tesla, going through one the most volatile stock market swings of the recent past, under conditions of financialised capitalism. We adopt a conjunctural approach, highlighting both the macro and micro dynamics shaping the firm’s financial market trajectory. Among these, meticulously maintained narratives, boosted by social media, attracted dedicated followers, while the rise of new retail trading platforms and excitement around Tesla’s index inclusion helped in producing its stock ‘mementum’. This volatility was further supported by an exceptionally large volume of financial derivatives trading, paralleling a public battle between short sellers and the company’s defenders. The resulting stock market boom enabled Tesla to stabilise its finances, whilst its ‘mercurial’ CEO Elon Musk negotiated the largest executive compensation package in US corporate history, turning him into the world’s richest individual. In conclusion, we argue that Tesla serves as an emblematic case of an increasingly tech-driven financialised capitalism, which scholars could use as a window to study future conjunctures.

The crisis that now grips the ‘living earth’ establishes an intersection of climate and finance which entails questions of time: what does temporality mean in the context of both climate emergency and the processes of financialisation? In this paper, I intervene in these debates by reflecting on the reconstruction of time as a concrete legal object in the space of international investor-state arbitration. Over the past decade, international arbitration settlements, often using the accounting technique of discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis, have increasingly relied on a conception of investor-oriented time that offers an expansive future, a time of long-term unbroken integrity. I trace the complex but often uneven shifts in arbitration practices through which the future is reconfigured not as a proximate and conditional object but as a category, encoded in DCF, which is endlessly expansive. The time of the unbroken asset, I argue, is in urgent disjuncture with the time of transition.

The UK government has called for employers to make work adaptations in response to changes in health individuals may experience as they age. However, government assumptions place too much emphasis on the voluntary actions of employers and managers, without placing the management of health in a wider context. Drawing on insights from Thompson’s disconnected capitalism thesis, we explore whether financial/competitive pressures facing many private and public sector organisations today, alongside other factors, contribute to organisations not considering or implementing work adaptations. In this context, it is suggested that older workers may also hide health issues because of anxiety, or ‘ontological precarity’, regarding working longer. Qualitative case studies compare the delivery of work adaptations in three organisations: ‘Local Government’, ‘Hospitality’, and ‘Trains’. Work adaptations were only widely available in Trains; this was for a range of reasons, including the fact that Trains was relatively insulated from financial pressures and able to deliver job and financial security for older workers. As many older workers will continue to be employed by organisations similar to Local Government and Hospitality, we argue that policy makers cannot rely solely on employers to make adaptations.

As sustainable finance has entered the mainstream, it has become an area of contestation among civil society, political and business. In response, policy makers seek to resolve stalemates and enhance legitimacy by utilising multistakeholder, consensus-driven approaches to policymaking. In this paper, we examine these emergent ‘cooperative’ structures from a network analytic perspective. Our structural analysis is based on six national and three EU policy spaces. We conduct compositional analyses to explore the makeup of the network(s) and use a range of centrality measures to capture emerging elites. We find an increase in civil society participation in these policy spaces over time; however, financial firms and pro-business voices remain dominant players. We also find a small cluster of elite actors from a range of stakeholder groups. We conclude that the increasing structural balance of stakeholder interests, however, does not translate into power for civil society to alter the direction of policymaking, but appears to serve enhancing the legitimacy of a policy process that departs from the priority and aspirations of civil society organisations.

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).

The theory of the monetary circuit aims to provide a highly stylised account of the workings of a modern monetary production economy. While there may have been a time when it succeeded in this aim, that time is over. The key development in the monetary sphere of capitalism over recent decades is the advent of financialisation, a phenomenon that circuit theory cannot explain other than by omitting some of its most important characterising features while indiscriminately dismissing those features that it does address as dysfunctional outgrowths. The fact is that a theory that has the aggregate monetary circuit as its methodological framework and whose sole focus is on the financing needs of firms is simply not flexible enough to accommodate the new reality of financialisation. To make that accommodation what is needed is a framework that is sufficiently elastic as to be able to encompass a broad range of socio-economic factors, most notably those associated with demographic change, as co-drivers of financialisaton. This article argues that a framework based on Marx's commodity principle meets this requirement.

Recent decades of financialisation have seen a significant growth in art that mobilises various forms of money as artistic media. These range from the integration of material money (coins, bills, credit cards) into aesthetic processes, such as sculpture, painting, performance, and so on, to a preoccupation with more ephemeral thematics including debt, economics, and the dynamics of the art market. This article explores three (and a half) strategies that artists use to engage with money: crass opportunism; a stark revelation of money's power; a coy play with art's subjugation to money; and a more profound attempt to reveal the shared labour at the heart of both money and art's aesthetic-political power. Money's perennial appeal to artists stems from the irony of its tantalising capacity to almost represent capitalist totality. At their core, both money and art are animated by a certain creative labour, a suspension of disbelief, and a politics of representation. Artistic practices that use money can provide critical resources for studying, understanding, and seeing beyond the rule of speculative capital.

The crisis of 2008 was a watershed event for the study of finance and society. There was the boom in financial markets that came to a head with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and there was the boom in financial scholarship that followed in its wake. But what comes after this second boom? After more than a decade of rapid expansion under the shadow of 2008, what comes next for the new finance studies? What are the emerging debates that matter most? Where lies the need for further theorisation and for new empirical work? In this editorial, these questions are pursued under three broad headings, each corresponding to an overarching imperative: first, the need to keep a vigilant watch on the core institutions and logics of finance; second, the need to continue expanding and deepening the field; and third, the need to persist with difficult lines of questioning.

The financial crisis of 2007-8 sparked a variety of responses from elites and popular movements across the world. Its legacy also continues to shape capitalist societies through ongoing processes of regulatory reform, state restructuring, and financial innovation. While these processes are open-ended, they are increasingly subject to critical attention from a range of commentators. The usual suspects are out in force – academics, politicians, and pundits – but they are now joined by a wider array of theorists and activists, playwrights, novelists and artists. The financialisation of capitalism, it seems, has finally been met with a blooming of the financial imagination. Finance and Society will provide a space for the further development of this imagination, generating new insights into how money and finance organise social life.

The valuation of insurance liabilities has traditionally been dealt with by actuaries, who closely monitored underlying illiquid features, assumed a long-term perspective, and exercised their own subjective, expert judgment. However, the new EU regulatory regime of Solvency II (S2) has come to require market-consistent valuation supplemented by a risk-sensitive capital. This is considered an unwanted shift towards short-termism that is misaligned with the industry's long term and countercyclical character. The new principles place the ‘technicalising’ logic of financial economics over ‘contextualising’ actuarial know-how. Following existing analytics of valuation from the ethnography of reinsurance markets and the social studies of finance, such requirements appear either as an alarming attack against the actuarial component of traditional valuation practice, or else as a preserver of it, through a process of enfolding at the heart of the financialisation project. This article holds that the case of S2 challenges both these analytics of valuation. S2’s financialisation project, precisely by attempting to construct itself, deconstructs itself into an actuarial project, in a recurring, aporetic process. In this respect, fair (or otherwise) valuation remains always undecidable, inconclusive, and thus responsible.

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.

This article argues that the problematic nature of money's ‘location’ is important to opening up its more fundamental ontology. Using examples from recent financial crises, I explore the (temporary) historical relationship between money and the nation state, the changing nature of money, and the paradoxes these produce in a world convinced that money is real and material. I conclude that whilst we cannot resolve these ingrained paradoxes, we should at the very least take account of them as we try to explain the vagaries of our money economies.

Geoffrey Harcourt remained a steadfast left Keynesian all his life. He applied his economic analysis in framing policy recommendations targeting the welfare of the poor. He undertook incisive and comprehensive surveys of the work of Cambridge post-Keynesians, some of whom were involved intellectually or practically in the economics of developing economies. Keynes, remaining an imperialist as far as India was concerned, nevertheless produced a corpus which has been immensely helpful in understanding developing economies and prescribing policy solutions for them. First, Keynes created the modern macroeconomics discipline and refined the concept of national income, allowing methods of collecting and organising economic and social data enabling assessment of intersectoral impacts. Second, still relevant today is his idea of an International Clearing Union, disciplining countries with excessive balance of payments surpluses or deficits, even though American opposition at Bretton Woods prevented its adoption. Third, although an economist of the short run, Keynes took up issues of vital concern for the development of an underdeveloped economy, departing from his long-held fears about excessive population growth and contributing to policies for stabilising commodity prices. While Keynes remained a Eurocentric imperialist, his dreams for Europe in general and Britain in particular proved relevant for many developing countries today. He supported public investment and state involvement in solving problems of unemployment and industrial restructuring. His analysis of the instability of stock markets and dangers of financialisation remains highly relevant in a world experiencing major stock market crashes in almost every decade since the 1970s.

Financialisation is now an emerging field of research. Recently, the field has attracted criticism for its focus on large-scale economic processes, such as profit accumulation based not on production, but on a diversification of financial risk management tools – a focus which ignores the way in which individuals and households experience financialisation in everyday life. In addressing this gap, theorists have sought to understand financialisation as it relates to individuals as consumers and investors, increasing their need to integrate financial calculation into daily life. This article takes the analysis two steps further. First, it argues that precarious work is actually an aspect of financialisation, based on risk-shifting by employing organisations – a process of structural change in the labour market that actually undermines individual workers’ capacity to manage financial risk successfully. Second, it argues that financialisation is an ideology or narrative of individual responsibility, which seeks to legitimate structural change by promising emancipation through individual calculation. It draws on interviews with precarious workers to explore the gap between such norms of financial self-determination and the lived experience of insecure employment. It identifies this paradox of precariousness by focusing on people in professional occupations, who in theory are best placed to successfully negotiate economic change.