The time that money requires: Use of the future and critique of the present in financial valuation

The future is persistently considered in the sociology of finance from two divergent, problematic angles. The first approach consists in supplementing financial reasoning with an acknowledgement of the expectations that are needed in order to cope with an uncertain future and justify the viability of investment decisions. The second approach, often labelled critical, sees on the contrary in the logic of finance a negation of the future and an exacerbation of the valuation of the present. This is an impasse the response to which resides, we suggest, in considering the language of future value, which is indeed inherent to a financial view on things, as a political technology. We develop this argument through an examination of significant episodes in the history of financial reasoning on future value. We explore a main philosophical implication which consists in suggesting that the medium of temporality, understood in the dominant sense of a temporal progression inside which projects and expectations unfold, is not a condition for but rather a consequence of the idea of financial valuation.

What to Do in Financial Markets? Preferences and Incoherences of Future Investors

The beliefs and strategies to be mobilized by individuals who are about to start their activity as investors in financial markets have been an issue scarcely explored in the field of sociology of finance. In this paper we present new evidence about the opinions of future investors recurring to a survey administered to 177 Master students of financial markets. Our results highlight the structural incoherence in the values adopted by future investors and the centrality of these social actors’ beliefs in the constitution of the prevailing practices in financial markets.

First Impressions

This chapter situates the study within the original sociology of finance. It introduces the core ethnographic breakdown that motivated this project. While existing studies described trading floors as loud, stressful, and chaotic, the chapter describes one trading room at International Securities in 1999 as quiet and orderly. The reason for such disparity was the introduction of information technology during the 1990s, which had replaced loud oral communication as the key information exchange mechanism. This change in turn led Bob, the manager of the floor, to rethink the trading room as a space for interpreting and debating economic news and events.