This article examines the introduction of Jamaica’s central bank digital currency (CBDC), Jamaica Digital Exchange (JAM-DEX), to show how monetary innovation is embedded in questions of sovereignty, class, race, and religion. Drawing on 23 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kingston (2022–2024), it adopts a pragmatist anthropology of money and mobilizes three cultural lenses – institutional, infrastructural, and affective – to analyze how CBDCs are lived, interpreted, and contested in everyday life. The institutional lens reveals a struggle over monetary sovereignty that is continually undermined by the CBDC’s dependence on private, largely foreign-owned financial intermediaries for its circulation. The infrastructural lens shows how financial innovation can reproduce the racialized and classed hierarchies rooted in Jamaica’s colonial banking history. The affective lens shows how moral imaginaries, ranging from eschatological fears of the ‘Mark of the Beast’ to crypto-libertarian critiques of surveillance, shape public engagement with the CBDC. The article employs the metaphor of haunting to show how unresolved histories of racial capitalism re-emerge through JAM-DEX, producing a disjointed temporality in which digital futures arrive prematurely. The persistence of these financial ghosts reinforces the claim that CBDCs should be studied within their social, historical, and affective contexts.

This forum contribution reads Currency of Nihilism through the lens of John Holloway’s concept of ‘the scream’. It identifies a common thread between Samman’s conception of postmodern nihilism and Marxism’s concern with alienation in capitalism, which poses the question: what space is there for hope? I argue that, in its carefully crafted critique of the nihilistic structures and moods of modern finance, Currency of Nihilism bears no hallmarks of resignation: it is a powerful reminder of our ability to take control of our ‘doing’, of our ‘power-to’, and thus a significant example of ‘negation-and-creation’. Currency of Nihilism is a scream into the void which, perhaps counterintuitively, can be read as an act of hope.

Tech innovations have the potential to disrupt traditional banking by unbundling banking, money, and payments; however, their impact on the cross-border payments system (CBPS) – which still relies on correspondent banking (CoBanking) networks – remains uncertain. This uncertainty is compounded by the literature’s tendency to distinguish between cash clearing and credit and to focus on the latter. Challenging this distinction, the article offers a historical perspective on the role of credit in CoBanking and international payments. It reveals the deep-rooted importance of credit in the CBPS and highlights correspondent banks’ role in providing it. But deep-rooted does not mean static. Indeed, changes in bank-intermediated trade finance practices during and after WWI reshaped the London-based CoBanking network. Furthermore, cash clearing and credit operations remained remarkably congruent until at least the 1980s, as reflected in banks’ internal organisation, reporting, and contemporaries’ descriptions of the payment system. The article argues that adopting a definition of payment systems that integrates both cash clearing and credit is essential to understanding the history of CoBanking and how it supports the CBPS. It suggests that relying on tech firms to provide the elastic payments infrastructure the economy requires could equate to jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Discussing recent literature on online financial practices, this article argues that ‘finance becoming tech’ assumes the form of particular financial situations in the everyday, to be understood in terms of Erving Goffman’s concept of interaction order. While the interactionist strand in the social study of finance foregrounds the role of techno-social situations in the constitution of finance, this article suggests applying Goffman’s notion of the ‘interaction order’ to that debate and demonstrates the latter’s capability to reconstruct the techno-social mechanisms through which finance emerges in the everyday. Unlike the notion of ‘situation’, that of ‘interaction order’ addresses the constitution of situational boundaries through interactional procedures as they refer only partially and selectively to circumstances of their social contexts. Against this background, online financial practices are analytically contoured as techno-social situations that enable the emergence of finance as a matter of the everyday. It is argued that the enabling condition for this commingling of everyday and financial processes is a specific delimitation of the digital-financial interaction order from parts of its political economic context – in particular, the uncertainty that structurally characterizes the financial economy.

Based on a study of the Swiss mobile payment app Twint and its use as a tool for charitable giving, this article introduces a framework for studying redistributive imaginaries and examines donation ‘marketplaces’ and their implications. Engaging with literatures on socio-technical imaginaries, the platformization of payment, post-humanitarianism, and the digital-solutionist ethic, the article asks what happens when practices of giving are facilitated and enclosed by a tech-ified finance industry. Twint’s catalog-like platform for donating reconfigures digital giving and its relation to redistribution. We argue that donations platforms like Twint’s are introducing a new redistributive imaginary by interpellating users as donors, consumers and citizens who – given behavioral psychology – need guidance to exercise choice and become more ethical selves. On the basis of an interface analysis and interviews, we specify a ‘post-sovereign consumer-citizen redistributive imaginary’, characterized by a market frame and tech-solutionism. This imaginary relies on a bounded-rationality model of the human and promotes a post-political idea of democratic participation. The article notes a slippage between different semantics of ‘good’ and ‘better’ technology, which are relevant for a discursive-ideological analysis of the FinTech sector and its rhetoric more broadly. Analyzing them helps us better understand how platform operators are accruing power culturally, economically, and politically.

In this article, I examine how venture capital-driven hypergrowth is progressively reshaping political authority via an emergent Silicon Valley Consensus (SVC). Drawing on the political theory of Carl Schmitt, I argue that VC-backed firms are able to operate in a zone of exception that suspends or bypasses conventional regulatory boundaries, thus constraining the state’s competence to govern. By foregrounding disruptive innovation as a strategic maneuver that subverts political power while accelerating capitalist transformations, I ultimately characterize venture capital as an anti-politics machine – one that depoliticizes itself while trapping regulatory institutions and sovereign authority in a field of political necessity. Focusing on the United States while drawing global implications, I show how the SVC not only shifts decision-making power from public institutions to private actors, but also reconfigures the political necessity that compels governments to legitimize new forms of power in an era of rapid technological change.

AI’s growing role in finance challenges traditional expectations of transparency and theoretical understanding. While machine learning (ML) models enhance financial decision-making, they remain largely agnostic to established financial theories, producing knowledge and ignorance in ways that differ from traditional models like VaR, DCF, and Black-Scholes. This essay explores the decoupling of AI models from theoretical financial knowledge and the resulting forms of ignorance. Using 22 semi-structured interviews, we investigate how ML models generate epistemic uncertainties. We focus on causal ignorance: AI systems, including those supported by XAI, fail to provide genuine causal explanations. Because understanding causation is inherently theoretical, AI-driven finance remains theory-agnostic and marked by theoretical ignorance. We explore how this ignorance differs from that of traditional models and what it implies for the role of theory in finance. Finally, we present three possible scenarios for the future of theory in finance and outline directions for further research.

Adam Neumann surely ranks among the most disgraced corporate leaders of our time. The former WeWork founder and CEO, who was ousted from the company in 2019, became emblematic of the corporate excesses and hollow boosterism of post-dotcom Silicon Valley. In the public imagination his name is synonymous with failure and fraud. But to the outrage of many he is back on the scene, securing unprecedented backing from venture capital titan Andreessen Horowitz for his new real estate venture Flow. This essay unpacks the non-death of Adam Neumann, interrogating why someone seemingly so untouchable is being funded at the highest level by one of Silicon Valley’s most infamous VCs. I argue that, through his atypical ‘exiting’ of WeWork, whereby he extracted billions from the company without initial public offering or acquisition, Neumann attained a level of wealth and power that made him ripe for reinvestment. The case challenges the liberal ‘fake-it-till-you-make-it’ myth of Silicon Valley meritocracy. US tech today increasingly takes the form of billionaire VCs funding already-powerful, deceptive and ruthless repeat founders. It is this increasingly consolidated and cynical system that enables Adam Neumann to ‘fail up’; rewarded rather than punished for his extreme misdemeanors.

In this article, I place the blockchain within competing interpretations of the present as either an emerging technofeudal mode of production, or as a relatively unchanged capitalism. Drawing on a wide literature on zones – spaces in nation-states where the usual rules do not apply – I highlight three reconfigurations of territory, authority, and rights (TAR) associated with the blockchain today. These are: (1) the transnational expansion of crypto-related practices; (2) the national regulation and legitimation of cryptoassets; and (3) the reemergence of a liberal discourse linking human rights to the global exchange of private property. Through these examples, I demonstrate how the blockchain is part of a broader reshaping of accumulation and legal legitimation, mirroring the emergence of capitalism and the nation-state, but on a global scale. I conclude by arguing against the position that the reemergence of fascism is a red herring distracting us from the coming technofeudalism; instead, I claim that technofeudalism obscures the links between today’s techno-authoritarian shift and the enforcement of global corporate private property relations.

We examine the implications of tokenization for the transformation of things into financial assets. Framed as the ‘democratization’ of financial investment by its advocates, tokenization is a process whereby asset ownership is fractionalized and represented by a digital token to be sold to potential investors on blockchain-based platforms. Tokenization can be seen as an extension of securitization to illiquid real-world assets or digital assets; as such, tokenization is often framed as a technique to isolate risks, reduce financing costs, and generate returns without selling the underlying assets. For example, real estate security tokens offer fractionalized ownership to smaller investors through digital means lowering entry barriers, though such investors still typically lack exposure to diversified real estate token portfolios. Through an analytical and empirical investigation, we argue the governance claims made about tokenization obscure a key contradiction: tokenization is touted as a way to democratize financial markets, but the necessary adaptation of tokenization to prevailing financial market infrastructures undermines this democratization promise. Engaging with this contradiction, we unpack the governance of financial markets and assets through the techno-financial transformation of things into digital tokens, focusing on the promise of tokenization to democratize finance.

Is the formation of venture capital (VC) markets a national phenomenon? Against the common view that VC emerged in the US in the post-WWII period and later (yet independently) in Europe, we argue that the uneven relation between US and UK VC markets was crucial for British VC formation since the 1980s. Based on an empirical analysis of secondary literature and financial data, the article demonstrates that this relation is better understood through the lens of international financial subordination and identifies three types of dependencies to qualify this relation: the dependencies of UK VC on US start-up investments, US growth capital, and US exit deals. This type of financial subordination is specific to ‘alternative finance’, because highly profitable VC exits kick-started a flywheel effect in UK VC in the 2000s, and the subsequent expansion of British VC went hand in hand with a concentration of capital because UK VC followed a ‘winners-take-all’ logic that is characteristic of alt-finance in general. This suggests, counterintuitively, that after UK VC formed, the US economy benefitted more in financial, economic, and technological terms from the growing British VC market than its UK counterpart mainly because most large exit deals took place in the US.

With reference to Elon Musk’s FinTech strategy for X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, this essay critically interrogates the evolution of North American and European FinTech economies toward what is typically called ‘embedded finance’; that is, the technological integration of monetary and financial services into discrete social interactions and economic transactions by nonfinancial companies. We argue that embedded finance furthers the disappearance of FinTech as an evident market domain of technologically facilitated monetary and financial relations. Specialist FinTech startup intermediaries are receding into the background of an institutional and digital landscape shaped by strong monopolization tendencies. FinTech economies are increasingly dominated by major platform firms with the assistance of banks. Relatedly, FinTech services have become ubiquitous to the extent that they are taken for granted by people who are configured as platform users that are ripe for rent capture, rather than as sovereign consumers searching for products. The disappearance of FinTech should not be confused with its demise, however. Disappearance is the fullest expression of the transformative appearance of FinTech in people’s everyday monetary and financial lives over the last quarter century.

Platform finance implies financial institutions’ growing dependence on the infrastructure and technologies of large tech firms. This reliance manifests itself most clearly in cloud services provision where American technological hegemony has triggered concerns about technological sovereignty in the European Union. In China, American Big Techs have not gained much of a foothold given the role of domestic Techfins in a wider attempt to install algorithmic governance. The observed interdependencies and segmentations of global digital technology networks warrant a further analysis of how cloud finance becomes enmeshed in wider geopolitical power struggles. Based on official document analysis, this article studies the geopolitical dimensions of cloud finance regulation in the EU, the US, and China. Given the fragmented nature of cloud regulation, it compiles insights from data protection, market competition, financial sector regulation, and cybersecurity to understand how cloud finance is governed in each macro-block. Our analysis shows how regulation in the three blocs supports US financial cloud hegemony, whilst producing financial cloud subordination of its geopolitical ally the EU and drawing China into financial cloud insulation.

In the near future, individuals and non-financial firms will use generative artificial intelligence (AI) to execute everyday financial tasks. Users may deploy ‘AI agents’ such as Apple’s Siri or Google’s Gemini to pay their bills, recommend financial products or manage investment portfolios, and perform myriad other financial activities. Although users may receive benefits from having AI agents offer financial services, these applications pose significant risks both to customers and to the financial system: they may fail to act in users’ best interests, engage in market manipulation, and cause financial instability. This essay argues that regulators are unprepared for technology firms to use open finance and AI architecture to provide individualized financial services without human interaction. It argues that AI agents are the next technological innovation in finance that should be regulated, but that US banking regulators lack authority to directly regulate deposit brokers, posing risks to financial stability and the general public.

This forum contribution explores the strengths and limits of Noam Yuran’s innovative call for a new political economy of sex and desire. It has three prongs. First, I discuss Yuran’s compelling focus on the curious durability of monogamy as an institution. Second, I examine his analysis of thinkers such as Mandeville and Weber. Finally, I turn to the question of love. I suggest that Yuran’s approach opens a pathway to a more loving and more realistic political economy of intimacy and familial love, one that I suggest is missing in much critical theory today, particularly in the rhetoric of family abolitionists.

Synthetic datasets, artificially generated to mimic real-world data while maintaining anonymization, have emerged as a promising technology in the financial sector, attracting support from regulators and market participants as a solution to data privacy and scarcity challenges limiting machine learning (ML) deployment. This article argues that synthetic data’s effects on financial markets depend critically on how these technologies are embedded within existing ML infrastructural ‘stacks’ rather than on their intrinsic properties. We identify three key tensions that will determine whether adoption proves beneficial or harmful: (1) data circulability versus opacity, particularly the ‘double opacity’ problem arising from stacked ML systems, (2) model-induced scattering versus model-induced herding in market participant behavior, and (3) flattening versus deepening of data platform power. These tensions directly correspond to core regulatory priorities around model risk management, systemic risk, and competition policy. Using financial audit as a case study, we demonstrate how these tensions interact in practice and propose governance frameworks, including a synthetic data labeling regime to preserve contextual information when datasets cross organizational boundaries.

Political economists continue to imagine the twentieth century in terms of three interlocking transformations: the neoclassical revolution in economics, the political triumph of neoliberalism, and the financialisation of the world economy. In his new book, The Sexual Economy of Capitalism, Noam Yuran tells a completely different story, identifying an obscene financial kernel already present at the dawn of modern capitalism and tracing the effects of its later blooming across a wide range of contemporary settings. In this essay, I develop an exaggerated version of Yuran’s narrative, drawing particular attention to the theoretical and philosophical implications of an obscene perspective on financial life today.

This article traces the shifting fortunes of for-profit psychedelic medicine through two phases: a boom from 2016 to late 2021, followed by a bust that continued through late 2024. It argues that the forces driving this cycle are best understood through the concept of capitalization, which links present valuations to investor expectations about future earnings. Engaging the capital-as-power framework, the article situates psychedelic companies within the broader biopharmaceutical sector, showing how the volatility of drug development is intensified by the unruliness of these substances as capitalized assets. This unruliness stems from a range of factors, including murky intellectual property claims, unpredictable and intense subjective experiences, and lingering cultural stigma. During the boom, firms attracted significant interest from venture capital and other investors by promising revolutionary breakthroughs in mental health treatment. As expectations rose, so did valuations. But disappointing results from clinical trials, regulatory setbacks, and deepening doubts about the ability to control and standardize psychedelic therapies led to sharp declines in investor confidence. Analyzing financial performance alongside investor narratives, the article underscores the tensions involved in subjecting these unruly substances to the logic of capitalist power.

With fintech investment apps providing convenience and round-the-clock access to financial markets on the go, investors are becoming more active in managing their financial lives through smartphones and other mobile devices. However, fintech investing’s role in the financialization of everyday life remains unclear. Combining insights from Foucauldian governmentality and Science and Technology Studies (STS), this article positions fintech brokerage apps as both neoliberal tools in governing investor conduct and as agencements in reconfiguring financial subjectivities. Based on a survey and interviews with lay investors in Singapore, the findings reveal that fintech investors use app-based brokerages as a tool to invest conveniently and at low cost. However, users themselves may resist the financial subjectivities promoted by fintech investing, driven by skepticism towards gamified and other algorithmic app features. They are also motivated by feelings of uncertainty towards fledgling fintech startups and difficulties in their interactions with the app user interface. To mitigate uncertainty, investors adopt various tactics to protect their portfolios.

Venture capital (VC) has recently emerged as a powerful new actor in the military domain. In the USA, VC investment in defence startups doubled between 2019 and 2022. A similar trend is noticeable in Europe, where billions are funnelled into AI-drone startup companies, spurred by escalating conflicts around the globe. VC investment is a ‘high-risk-high-reward’ way of financing military technologies, which requires fast-paced exponential growth at scale (‘blitzscaling’) and the disruption of existing markets. But with disruption comes debris. What happens when military organisations, which must navigate ethical questions pertaining to life and death, become shaped in the image of Silicon Valley and VC funding? This paper argues that the VC sector exerts a significant influence not only on military procurement processes but also on the direction of military operations and practices. This, in turn, has potentially significant effects on the communities and stakeholders affected by military operations, including those caught in the crosshairs of VC-backed AI technologies.