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... more
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.
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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... more
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?
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Research Interests: Sociology, Security, Information Economy/Society, Contract, Money, and 4 moreValue, Collateral, Pledge, and Moneyness
When, seven years ago, Marieke de Goede first drew attention to the historical and conceptual entanglements between the logics of finance and security, and to the artificial – yet meaningful – divide between the two in modernity, this was... more
When, seven years ago, Marieke de Goede first drew attention to the historical and conceptual entanglements between the logics of finance and security, and to the artificial – yet meaningful – divide between the two in modernity, this was not merely a call for a new research programme. Attempting to hold together these two objects of disciplinary enquiry, and becoming aware of the tendency to collapse one into the other inherent to International Political Economy (IPE) or International Relations (IR) analytics, was also a much needed exercise of disciplinary critique, consistent with interrogating divides between the economic and the social, the financial and cultural. In other words, more than just a new object or field of empirical and theoretical research, the finance-security nexus was proposed as a device for critically and genealogically thinking through distinct disciplinary approaches to economy, futurity and populations. To that end, this special issue proposes to take stoc...
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This forum contribution addresses the state of the art in the finance-security literature, identifying problems with the ‘financialisation of security’ and ‘securitisation of finance’ analytics, as well as a tendency to treat ‘money’ as a... more
This forum contribution addresses the state of the art in the finance-security literature, identifying problems with the ‘financialisation of security’ and ‘securitisation of finance’ analytics, as well as a tendency to treat ‘money’ as a non-financial object in ways that fail to recognise money’s own (financial) parameters of safety and security. In response, it calls for greater engagement with political and financial security, instead of merely (political) securitisation and financialisation.
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This article traces the contours of an inconspicuous kind of state power in the form of sovereign safety. This power is articulated, more precisely, in a combination of four elements: the historical term of public credit, the liquid... more
This article traces the contours of an inconspicuous kind of state power in the form of sovereign safety. This power is articulated, more precisely, in a combination of four elements: the historical term of public credit, the liquid government bond, the risk-free asset of financial textbooks and the safe-haven function assumed by the bond market in times of uncertainty. All of these involve a peculiar translation from sovereign debt as the most risky asset to sovereign creditworthiness, circulating unsecured. If critical security studies has largely limited itself to a critique of the relatively recent sense of political state security, this article explores the relevance of a far older financial sense of ‘security’ and ‘securitization’ for contemporary studies of security. So far, the Foucault-inspired finance–security literature has emphasized the risk calculus as a principal mechanism in ‘securing circulation’. This article argues that sovereign safety constitutes an important overlooked factor in securing circulation in two ways: As the main form of collateral for financial transactions, its capacity to secure derives from being considered secure itself. As an epistemic variable, it constitutes the bedrock of modern finance theory. Moreover, rather than neatly complementary to the liberal security dispositif, sovereign safety can to some extent be said to represent the very object of the Foucaultian divesture of power.
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Collateral has since antiquity been used as a safeguard for contractual obligations, such as debt. But how did debt, and in particular government debt, itself become the most common form of collateral in the financial system? In other... more
Collateral has since antiquity been used as a safeguard for contractual obligations, such as debt. But how did debt, and in particular government debt, itself become the most common form of collateral in the financial system? In other words, how did government debt become "safe"? The safety of sovereign debt corresponds to the establishment of sovereign creditworthiness: from sovereign bonds being charged a significantly higher interest rate than commercial loans in the Middle Ages to circulating "unsecured", that is, no longer requiring additional security in the form of either collateral or a high interest rate but trading merely on "full faith and credit". Modern finance theory and standard economics have treated the safety of sovereign debt as an assumption that has been fundamental to the main pricing models for stocks and derivatives in the form of the risk-free asset. Economic history at the same time however tells us that there is no such thing as a perfectly safe sovereign. How can one make sense of both these stories: sovereign safety as an axiom of modern finance as well as its historical contingency, relativism and dependency on perception? This chapter traces the answer to this question partly in a forgotten linkage of financial and imaginary fiction and argues that it is in the wider history of the public/ private and fact/ fiction distinctions as well as their co-evolution that one should seek to place a history of sovereign safety.