This special issue explores how finance deploys time, structures the future, and interacts with actors and institutions that sometimes function according to very different temporal regimes. Finance capitalism's logic of recurrence, repetitive cycles, and successive ruptures has long been with us, but the essays in this special issue are particularly interested in how recent decades of intensified financialization have restructured temporal experience. They interrogate the production and dissemination of agency in an age of acceleration, risk, and uncertainty, asking how the temporality inscribed in financial transactions emerges from and simultaneously shapes individual and social practice. Topics covered range from the logic of finance and foundational concepts of financial theory to the intersection between objective structures and social practice, the role of literature, and finally questions of social insecurity, political action, and the possibility of resistance within a context of competing temporalities. In this introduction, the editors delineate some fundamental concepts and questions for our financial times.

The global financial crisis is usually seen as a failure of neoclassical economic theory and neoliberal policy, but it also represented an epistemological failure. Forecasters who missed the crisis neglected to include the financial sector in their models, while aggregate indicators such as GDP failed in spite (or perhaps because) of their heavy emphasis on financially driven growth. In contrast to both critics and proponents of GDP who see it as a purely statistical measure, this article argues that GDP is in fact a form of numerical rhetoric. Political messages in such estimates were explicit until the early twentieth century, but have since become implicit in hidden assumptions. To uncover the narratives built-in to GDP's view of finance, the article conducts a thought-experiment comparing GDP with two counterfactual indicators corresponding to historical views of finance as either non-productive or an actual cost to society. The analysis shows how changing this single assumption leads to very different narratives regarding the class-balance of workers vs. capitalists, the relative importance of consumption, and the extent of space that exists for public policy to influence the economy. The article concludes with some thoughts on making the implicit assumptions in GDP explicit, and opening up the debate to the broader public in a transparent way.

The rise of financial technology (FinTech) engenders novel business models through integrating financial services and information and communication technologies (ICT). Digital currencies and payments, data mining, and other FinTech applications threaten to radically overhaul the financial sector. This article argues that, while we are becoming aware of how technology giants such as Apple Inc. are making inroads into financial services, we need to become more sensitive to how financial incumbents mimick ICT firms while aiming to neutralize the FinTech challenge. Practices from Silicon Valley are spilling over into ‘traditional’ finance through a process we dub Appleization. We illustrate how incumbents aim to remain indispensable amidst rapid digitization. Mimicking tech strategies, financial incumbents resort to transforming legacy ICT systems into integrated platforms, cultivating entrepreneurial ecosystems where startups are ‘free’ to compete whilst effectively being locked into the incumbent's orbit. We illustrate this by comparing Apple's business features (locking-in developers, customers and state into a hybrid business model based on a synergy between hardware, software and data-driven platform components) with emerging practices in the financial industry. Our analogy suggests that the Appleization of finance might radically transform, yet not undercut the oligopolistic position of financial incumbents.

Traditional societies were defined by a prevalence of the past in the definition of the present. United States (US) society seems to show the opposite trend: the present is defined as the preparation of the future. Financial temporality can be seen as an example of the present use of the future, transforming future possibilities into available wealth. As the financial crisis has shown, however, the temporality of the future is more complex and circular. This article deals with quantitative easing (QE) as a financial instrument with an essentially temporal nature (in the sense that it uses time and acts on the future and on expectations). The success of QE in the US economy reveals essential aspects of US temporality, but also raises questions as to how it may differ from European temporality. The analysis of QE measures and their impact also offers ways to assess whether and by which means politics can intervene into finance, as well as what consequences and uncertainties are created in the process.

How exactly did the neoliberal imaginary that Konings describes gain so much traction? Was its speculative temporality smoothly translated into practice from the writings of Hayek and others as he suggests, or was its production a messier, more contested, and more contingent affair? In this brief commentary, I go back to one of the key historical moments that he examines, the Volcker shock of 1979-82, and examine some of the more mundane political and technical struggles that defined the early Reagan Administration’s efforts to put the neoliberal speculative logic into practice. By revealing the often-flawed material efforts that go into producing speculative temporalities, I argue that such struggles might allow us to arrive at a less teleological account of the resilience of neoliberalism.

This article argues that the temporality of the financial economy ought to be seen as radically synchronistic. ‘Synchronism’ refers to both an epistemological and practical approach that addresses finance neither with a view to the past nor to the future, but is instead focused on the moment that a financial transaction is settled (i.e., the horizon of trading). From this perspective, the article expands the scope of current social theorizing on financial markets, which is characterized by a preoccupation with the futurity of financial markets and products. It suggests that financial synchronism can be traced back to certain developments in economic theory since the so-called ‘marginalist revolution’, which enabled the transfer of a certain optics informing market theories into financial practices. On these terms, financial synchronism is interpreted as a powerful social imaginary that crucially mediates the way contemporary societies face the contingency of the future.

This article examines the conceptual transformation of what was once considered usury into finance. To counter traditional arguments that usury was exploitative and unnatural, early modern theorists reconceptualized debt as a form of investment for both borrowers and lenders. Today, this ethical justification of debt as an investment underlies the rhetoric of finance and financialization. Close examination of the realities of contemporary financialized debt, however, reveal that much of this rhetoric is misleading and false. While the rhetoric of finance is unrelentingly oriented toward the future, the lived reality of debt is one of being constrained and haunted by the past. Relatedly, this rhetoric exhorts borrowing for investment, while finance has actually had the opposite effect of making consumer debt a necessity for the majority of Americans. Taken together, these realities of debt today contradict the rhetoric of finance as investment and undermine the ethical framework on which it depends.

Konings successfully mobilizes social theory to demonstrate how various post-Marxist, Polanyian, and Foucauldian analyses fail to make sense of financialization and neoliberal governance as persistent societal formations. In their place he offers an analysis focused on the logic of ‘leverage’, which he sees as a source of not only private gain but also governmental power. I fully endorse Konings' turn to social theory, and in particular to the work of Niklas Luhmann. But I suggest that, since Konings leaves out Luhmann's broader theory of society, he can neither capture the tight couplings between the economy and politics presupposed in neoliberal governance, nor contextualize this governance as a ‘provincial’, US-centred project.

Former US president George W. Bush's idea of the United States as an ‘ownership society’ can be considered as the rhetorical apex of a conservative, libertarian push for a more market-driven restructuring of American social institutions. Reformers in the Bush administration particularly targeted Social Security, a popular American institution and signature achievement of the New Deal era, aiming to replace a system of solidarity with one of individual responsibility and partial privatization. Returning to the time of the early 2000s, this article analyzes the rhetoric of the ownership society as a libertarian utopian social vision - a future, more perfect community the United States should aspire to grow into. It argues that the political discourse on Social Security propagated by the Bush administration relied on rhetorical strategies characterized by an engagement of temporalities. On the one hand, ownership discourse invoked the nation's past achievements and traditional values secured during the American Revolution and guaranteed in the nation's founding documents. On the other hand, the administration framed the alleged urgency of the reforms by making projections about the future and using these to raise questions about the present system of Social Security provision. In this way, earlier debates over Social Security reform provide a valuable perspective on the contemporary nexus of finance and temporality.

Proposing a non-moralistic critique of the changes to neoliberal capitalism post-crisis, Konings provides a refreshing take on the dynamics of financial governance, emphasizing the way linkages between state and finance are structured by a speculative logic internal to neoliberalism. In this essay, I raise a number of questions about this characterization of neoliberalism, focusing on issues of agency and durability. First, does the turn to systems theory allow for a satisfactory account of the role that agency has played in the historical expansion of neoliberalism? And second, is it possible to envisage an end to neoliberalism when neoliberalism is so closely identified with capital dynamics in general?

What is the relationship now, and what should the relationship be, between a social-theory oriented critique of neoliberalism, such as the one Konings provides, and other disciplines? In this review essay, I suggest some of the conversations we might form between Konings' text and texts of a more Marxist variety, including Alfred Sohn-Rethel's Intellectual and Manual Labor, as well as contemporary literary studies texts, including Mary Poovey's Genres of the Credit Economy and Fredric Jameson's “Culture and Finance Capital”. In each potential pairing, I suggest a possible relationship between historical time, financial time, and narrative itself.

This article develops a reading of Don DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis that differentiates between two thematic and poetological axes running through the text. On the one hand, Cosmopolis explores the future-fixation of the risk regime of finance capitalism; on the other, it stages scenes of insecurity that physically threaten the protagonist and his world. Insecurity, the article argues, is a condition that throughout the text increasingly gains in appeal because it promises to offer an alternative to a world of managed risk. The concern with security emphasizes finitude and mortality, thus enabling a turn to existential matters that the virtual abstractions of finance have seemingly made inaccessible. While proposing an opposition between a logic of risk based on virtuality and a logic of (in)security based on authenticity, DeLillo's novel also suggests that it is impossible to break out of the logic of risk management pervading late modernity. The appeal of (in)security articulated in Cosmopolis rather lies in the promise to existentially revitalize life within the confines of financialized capitalism.

Based on a reading of Joseph O'Neill's 2008 novel Netherland, this article discusses the relationship between cricket and finance capitalism from the perspective of time and temporality. Despite its function as a global commodity, cricket inserts a flow of postcolonial time into the temporal streams of transnational market culture, neoliberalism, and the increasing financialization of the world. Set in the aftermath of 9/11 and before the financial crisis of 2008, Netherland juxtaposes the deviant temporal power of cricket with the time structures of finance capitalism to illustrate how the conduct of Wall Street before the crisis can be understood as a colonial appropriation. In O'Neill's novel, this conflict is embodied in the precarious friendship of a cosmopolitan Dutch financial analyst and a Trinidadian version of Jay Gatsby.

This rejoinder takes up some of the points that have been raised by the reviews of Capital and Time in this forum. It engages the question of how political economy should position itself vis-à-vis concerns about the dangers of essentialism and teleological explanation. It argues that a proper theorization of the logic of ‘leverage’ is key to the development of a political economy that appropriates the insights of post-foundational theory but is still able to account for the reality of power and inequality.

As the subtitle of her new book suggests, Mazzucato aims to distinguish value creators from value extractors. This distinction between making and taking, between earning and deserving, between rent-seeking and value-contributing, is posited as crucial, yet it can no longer be made from within the paradigm of neoclassical economics, which has defined the distinction out of existence. Mazzucato shows this was not always so: classical economists did make the distinction, as did preceding economic schools such as the Physiocrats. This, however, is not a purely intellectual exercise; Mazzucato seeks to influence public debate, stating that “only by debunking ideas about value … can a long-lasting solution be found” (213), the problem being that what the financial sector, pharmaceutical companies, and national account statisticians call ‘value creation’ is in fact typically the opposite.

This article examines different ways in which finance models have become the ruling mode of spatializing relationships, arguing that the ongoing convergence of economic and spatial investment has transformed our environments into heavily contested ‘financescapes’. First, it reflects upon architecture's capacity to give both material and symbolic form to these processes and considers the impacts this has on the emergence of novel kinds of urban investment frontiers, including luxury brand real estate, free zones, private cities, and urban innovation hubs. Focusing on speculative urban developments in Morocco and the United Arab Emirates, the article then highlights the performative dimension of such building programs: how architectural capital is put to work by actively performing the frontiers of future development. Physically staking out future financial gains, this mode of operation is today becoming increasingly manifested in urban crowdfunding schemes. We argue that, far from promoting new models of civic participation, such schemes are functioning as a testbed for speculation around new patterns of spatial production in which architecture acts less as the flagstaff of capital than as a capital system in itself.

The work of the artist and writer Gerald Nestler explores finance and its social implications since the mid-1990s. Based on his professional experience as a trader as well as on post-disciplinary research, he has developed a unique approach that brings together theory and conversation with installation, video, performance, text, and other art forms. Probing into the narrative structures of contemporary capitalism, Nestler offers a techno-political critique directly from the core of the financial markets. This interview addresses his reading of the derivative as a world-producing apparatus that shapes the experience of the present by preconfiguring the future, and that provokes a shift from representational to performative speech in the actualization of biopower based on the exploitation of volatility and leverage. In conversation with Christian Kloeckner and Stefanie Mueller, he argues for the formation of specific human/non-human alliances that directly attack algorithmic as well as socio-economic black-boxing (schemes that monopolize inherently non-scarce resources), so as to open our imagination to skills and tactics that would allow us to navigate the rich but volatile flows of social, political, and economic abundance.