Finance is not something separate from society. It is neither a Marxian superstructure nor a monetarist veil, but rather the very substance of modern social relations, a web of time-dated promises to pay that stretches from now into the future, and from here around the globe. Financial relationships are not about mediating something else on the ‘real’ side of the economy; they are the constitutive relationships of the whole system. Financial globalization and global financialization have produced a global Financial Society, hierarchical and inherently unstable. The problem confronting social analysts is not so much to find the social in the money grid - the money grid is already social - but rather to understand the dynamical operations of that grid on its own terms. This essay sketches the fundamental processes that produce and reproduce Financial Society - settlement and market-making - as an attempt to provide a realistic point of departure for any feasible project of reform.

A new form of digital economic circulation has emerged, wherein ideas, knowledge, labour and use rights for otherwise idle assets move between geographically distributed but connected and interactive online communities. Such circulation is apparent across a number of digital economic ecologies, including social media, online marketplaces, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and other manifestations of the so-called ‘sharing economy’. Prevailing accounts deploy concepts such as ‘co-production’, ‘prosumption’ and ‘peer-to-peer’ to explain digital economic circulation as networked exchange relations characterised by their disintermediated, collaborative and democratising qualities. Building from the neologism of platform capitalism, we place ‘the platform’ — understood as a distinct mode of socio-technical intermediary and business arrangement that is incorporated into wider processes of capitalisation — at the centre of the critical analysis of digital economic circulation. To create multi-sided markets and coordinate network effects, platforms enrol users through a participatory economic culture and mobilise code and data analytics to compose immanent infrastructures. Platform intermediation is also nested in the ex-post construction of a replicable business model. Prioritising rapid up-scaling and extracting revenues from circulations and associated data trails, the model performs the structure of venture capital investment which capitalises on the potential of platforms to realise monopoly rents.

This article examines the effects of implementing the proposals of the European Commission to institute a Capital Market Union (CMU) on the diverse landscape of residential capitalism in Europe. The CMU will bypass existing national institutional blockades that left core countries of the Eurozone, namely Germany, France and Italy, largely untouched by the housing-centred financialization that developed in countries like Spain, Ireland, the UK and the Netherlands. It is widely acknowledged that the rise in securitized mortgage debt contributed to the global financial crisis. As part of the CMU, the new European Commission is promoting mortgage securitization throughout the EU and thereby rescaling the political economy of housing finance that was hitherto rooted in national, institutional models. We argue that countries which ‘missed’ the previous housing boom will not be able to prevent future housing-centred financialization. CMU thus signifies a spatial expansion of the debt-led accumulation model.

Drawing on Judith Butler's concept of injurious speech, this article conceptualises the ‘Grexit’ crisis as a series of performances. More specifically, we investigate how the Greek government framed the bailout plans tabled by the Troika as a form of torture. By adopting phrases such as ‘fiscal water-boarding’, ‘asphyxiation’, and ‘suicide’, the Syriza government sought to narrate the harm inflicted on Greece by its creditors. Paying attention to this language is important as it casts new light on how Greek sovereign debt has been framed, negotiated, and contested. In many ways, the overarching objective of this article is to tell a different story that takes discursive transitivity and restaging into account. By shifting the emphasis onto injurious speech, the article also brings the unintended effects of this language into focus. Despite the recurrent accusations made by Syriza as it attempted to resolve the Greek sovereign debt crisis, this article questions whether their bargaining strategy ‘misfired’. On closer consideration, we find that the injurious speech acts performed by the Syriza government compromised their ability to negotiate a third bailout deal in 2015. The observations remind us that words can wound in ambivalent ways.

The UK student loans system is in crisis and the government plans to sell off student loans to corporate purchasers. Such loan sales disadvantage government, the taxpayer and student borrowers. The government should give student borrowers the ‘right to buy’ their own loans for the same price the government is prepared to sell those loans to corporate purchasers. If borrowers purchased their own loans, disadvantages of loan sales would transform into advantages. The ‘right to buy’ can fairly be extended to all borrowers, regardless of whether their loans are being sold; this is done by extending the ‘right to buy’ as a ‘right to reduce’ student loans. The ‘right to reduce’ also provides a solution to the problem of how to ‘deal with’ existing student debt. Because the ‘right to buy’ and the ‘right to reduce’ both follow government's pricing for loan sales, they should be universally acceptable; moreover, government, taxpayers and borrowers would be better off.

Much has been learned about calculation, commodification and marketization from the social studies of markets and finance. But what of capitalization? What is distinctive about this mode of valuation and the reality it impels? What does it mean to live under the ‘asset condition’? In Capitalization: A Cultural Guide, Fabian Muniesa and his colleagues at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation take us on a tour across multiple continents and several centuries, introducing us to capitalization as a ‘cultural syndrome’. Their pragmatist enquiry involves tracing capitalization via the scenarios in which value is created, and the gaze that stimulates such value-creation. The result is a field guide to the terrain of capitalization that integrates anthropological work on the dramaturgy of finance with sociological attention to the technicalities of valuation. The stage is set for further investigation into the uneven distribution of the capacity to capitalize and its consequences.

At least since the publication of ‘Rules rather than discretion’ by Nobel Prize winners Kydland and Prescott (1977), an undisputed principle in monetary economics is that central bankers should be politically independent. Politicians have an electoral incentive to jack-up the money supply to finance programmes the electorate favours, ignoring the inflation this will result in. Monetary policy is therefore best separated from fiscal policy, leaving the latter to politicians, while entrusting the former to central bankers, whose sole calling is to ensure moderate inflation and financial stability by determining the conditions (i.e., interest rate and collateral) under which private banks can borrow from the central bank. Although central banks’ independence might be undemocratic, it is nonetheless in the long-run interest of the citizenry.