Finance and Society
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Published By "Ukoln, University Of Bath"

2059-5999

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-66
Author(s):  
Nina Boy

Vogl’s account of contemporary financial truth games suggests that a full understanding of our present condition requires the kind of knowledge produced by fiction and those who study it. But what kind of knowledge is that, and how does it escape the capitalist ontology of information?


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-70
Author(s):  
Jürgen Schraten

Digital payment tools and mobile money receive growing attention as a possible tool for alleviating poverty and expanding the benefits of market economies. Especially the Kenyan product M-Pesa gained prominence, since Suri and Jack (2016) published a study according to which it paved a way out of poverty for 2% of the country’s households. However, there are more skeptical notions, too. This debate is now gets a good basis in the long-term ethnographic study by Sibel Kusimba. She endows the conflicting assessments with differentiated reports on the contexts of M-Pesa usage in the Kenyan society.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-57
Author(s):  
Franziska Cooiman

Vogl’s new book relates finance to the internet industry and economics to politics. Introducing questions of colonial history and racism would further sharpen his view of the drivers and dynamics of contemporary capitalism.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-29
Author(s):  
Daniel Souleles

This article presents a close, dialogue-based ethnographic account of a group of contemporary options market makers making a decision about pricing options in Tesla, Inc. Careful attention to their deliberations reveals how the rise of algorithms and automation on financial markets have rendered traders alienated and estranged from the markets they work on for their livelihood. This alienation arises, in part, due to novel cascade effects between futures and underlying equities, which algorithmic and automated trading seems to afford, and which also relate to news events as well as the actions of politicians and prominent business people. Emerging from this alienation, traders produce a critique of how highly automated financial markets allocate capital and how ripe they are for political manipulation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 94-112
Author(s):  
Christopher Gibson

How does financialization of the economy impact public governance of natural resources? One way includes a shift in how savings and cash accumulation are understood and practiced within public agencies. This article proffers that in the second half of the twentieth century, it became a taken-for-granted understanding that long-term savings should be held in financial investment accounts instead of traditional savings accounts. As a result of this, municipal organizations act as fiscally independent investors, marshaling economic resources to pursue strategic objectives that align with financialized institutional logics. Using a case study of the largest supplier of drinking water in the US, this article examines how the use of financial investments by a major public resource agency, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, evolved since first establishing an investment policy in the 1940s. Today, this organization maintains investments worth over one billion dollars. Analysis of archival documents suggests that financial activities, even if yielding dwindling returns over time, are counted upon as a source of revenue, deployed to obtain favorable bond ratings, used for access to earmarked funds, and leveraged to acquire land in water-strategic locations. Considering the ubiquity of these financial practices among medium to large-sized municipal governing bodies, the results of this study are suggestive and generalizable across substantive governing fields and in other locations. Ultimately, this study shows that public governance agencies are intertwined with private capital flows, problematizing the oft-assumed distance between public and private actors. The article also interrogates the influence that financial markets have over of public policy, showing that elected governance officials engage in the commodification of money, encouraging the further commodification of environmental resources.  


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 130-39
Author(s):  
Adam Hayes

This essay makes the case that current debates about the ‘moneyness’ of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are occurring at the incorrect scale. Rather than being some form of trans-national digital money to be used alongside or compete with national fiat currencies, I argue that, instead, each cryptocurrency represents its own self-contained ‘money-world’. Put differently, a cryptocurrency is the uniquely specified unit of account and medium of exchange within the socio-technical bounds of its own blockchain. This new perspective can open new lines of intellectual dialogue and inform better policy choices for regulating cryptocurrencies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-61
Author(s):  
Ute Tellmann
Keyword(s):  

Vogl describes how digital economies and current financialization have a common genealogy that hinges on protocol and information. How should we understand the anatomy of power that governs this contemporary configuration? As argued in this review, the notion of ‘immunity’ can help illuminate the techniques of power at work in digital economies, social media, and finance.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-51
Author(s):  
Aaron Sahr
Keyword(s):  

Vogl interprets the structural discrediting of knowledge and the corresponding glorification of mere assertion as nothing less than the tectonics of our time. But this diagnosis presupposes that it makes sense to examine different fields in terms of their epistemology – and to measure them against the same standards.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-45
Author(s):  
Joseph Vogl

Joseph Vogl’s new book, Capital and Ressentiment (2021/2022), traces an epistemic shift from knowledge to information driven by the convergence of financialization and the platform economy. As a variable that is determined less by semantic content than by difference to existing expectations, information invites indifference to other distinctions, such as those between fact and fiction, claim and proof. The circulation of information takes the form of opinion markets wherein the production of reality itself is at stake. In this extract, taken from the book’s final chapter, “The cunning of ressentiment-driven reason”, Vogl analyses populist ressentiment as both structural affect of and vital resource for information capitalism, laying out the resulting reconfiguration of the social.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-93
Author(s):  
Philipp Golka

Finance and financialization have dominated scholarship on capitalism and society for the past decade. Although scholars noted early on that the expansion of finance relies on the creation (and trade) of new financial assets, assets and assetization have been a blind spot as scholarship continued to focus on financial markets (Langley, 2020). This, however, is currently about to change as a number of landmark publications have been published in the past months that point toward growing momentum in the field of asset and assetization research. In this short essay, I review Kean Birch and Fabian Muniesa’s edited collection, Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism, which is of central importance to said momentum, and put it into dialogue with some of the other recent publications on this topic.


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