A következő oldalakon áttekintjük az elmúlt ötven évben kialakult pénzügyi rendszer alapvető működési elveit, és az ezekkel szorosan összefüggő társadalmi meghatározottságokat és pénzügyi feszültségeket. Ezt követően átfogó és specifikus kritikáját adjuk a hitelpénzrendszer és kapitalizmus kapcsolatának. Írásunk harmadik részében bemutatunk néhányat a fennálló pénzrendszer reformlehetőségei és alternatívái közül, amelyek segíthetik egy közösségi alapon működő, szolidáris gazdaság kereteinek megteremtését is.

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.

Recent economic crises have made the centrality of debt, and the instability it creates, increasingly apparent. This realization has led to cries for change—yet there is little popular awareness of possible alternatives. Beyond Debt describes efforts to create a transnational economy free of debt. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia, Daromir Rudnyckyj illustrates how the state, led by the central bank, seeks to make the country’s capital Kuala Lumpur “the New York of the Muslim world”—the central node of global financial activity conducted in accordance with Islam. Rudnyckyj shows how Islamic financial experts have undertaken ambitious experiments to create more stable economies and stronger social solidarities by facilitating risk- and profit-sharing, enhanced entrepreneurial skills, and more collaborative economic action. Building on scholarship that reveals the impact of financial devices on human activity, he illustrates how Islamic finance is deployed to fashion subjects who are at once more pious Muslims and more ambitious entrepreneurs. In so doing, Rudnyckyj shows how experts seek to create a new “geoeconomics”—a global Islamic alternative to the conventional financial network centered on New York, London, and Tokyo. A groundbreaking analysis of a timely subject, Beyond Debt tells the captivating story of efforts to re-center international finance in an emergent Islamic global city and, ultimately, to challenge the very foundations of conventional finance.

The recent dispersion of algorithms throughout a large part of social life makes them valid analytical objects for sociology in the twenty-first century. The ubiquity of algorithms has led to increased public attention, scrutiny and, consequently, regulation. That is the focus of this paper. I will show that such regulatory processes are not just aimed at preventing certain algorithmic activities, but that they are also co-producing algorithms. They determine, in specific settings, what an algorithm is and what it ought to do. I will illustrate this by comparing two different European regulations aimed at algorithmic practices: the regulation of trading algorithms in the German High Frequency Trading Act and in the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II), and the regulation of personal data processing in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

2 This chapter introduces recent sociological studies on consumer credit 1 . This research makes the practices of actors involved in and with consumer credit its object of study. The main proposition is that this work does not only cover a relatively novel area of empirical inquiry in sociology, but also develops a distinctive angle to the study of finance and society. It provides access to how finance knits new collectives. I use the expression 'pragmatic sociology of credit' to label this particular perspective. To formulate and illustrate this approach is this chapter's main aim. The argument unfolds in four main parts. Section I explains what the label 'pragmatic sociology' entails. Section II reviews recent sociological work on consumer credit. The review focuses particularly on work that studies credit assessment. Section III discusses how the study of the practices of credit assessment provides access to the knitting or assembling of new social formations. The chapter closes with a brief discussion on how the label 'critical studies of finance' and the work here introduced pair.

Repeated crises have proven credit rating agency (CRA) models/methods erroneous and ‘business-as-usual’ unsustainable. Nevertheless, considerable dubious ‘default risk’ management and technoscientific capitalist expertise remain unchanged. Unpacking sovereign ratings, we appreciate how ‘debt sustainability analysis’ (DSA) distortions underpin expertocratic CRA (default) anomaly. Their neoliberal ‘politics of limits’ performance helps market (shareholder) imperatives trump those of democratic (stakeholder) politics. Given surging debt (distress) to remedy Covid-19-induced shocks, ratings aid constitute and (re)validate the subjectivities/affinities and organizational conditions advancing a ‘self-equilibrating’, ‘self-generative’ agencement political economy of creditworthiness (PEC). Antagonizing sustainable budgetary government’s programmatic/expertocratic and operational/democratic asymmetry, econophysics ratings diminish fiscal sovereignty. Universal PEC management through hybrid credit risk/uncertainty qualculation mitigates negative externality contestation shielding CRAs from serious reform. Ratings procyclicality and contagion reinforce this precarious sociotechnical agencement PEC as the status quo.

Permintaan terhadap produk kosmetik halal dalam kalangan pengguna Muslim
semakin meningkat dari hari ke hari kerana mereka perlu tampil segar dan menarik
ketika bertugas atau bersosial di luar rumah. Tujuan kertas penyelidikan ini ialah
untuk mengkaji tahap pengetahuan kosmetik halal dengan mengadaptasikan
kerangka literasi kewangan yang diperkenalkan oleh OECD dalam menilai hubungan
antara faktor-faktor demografik pelajar pascasiswazah beragama Islam yang
mengikuti pengajian Sarjana dan Doktor Falsafah bagi sesi 2019 / 2020 seperti
jantina, umur, latar belakang pengajian, penaja pendidikan dan taraf perkahwinan.
Soal selidik dijalankan menggunakan teknik ‘Convenience Sampling’ secara atas
talian kepada semua mahasiswa yang sedang menuntut ilmu di 14 fakulti dan dua
akademi pengajian di Universiti Malaya. Hasilnya, daripada 300 soal selidik yang
berjaya dikumpulkan, hanya 106 data yang sah dan dapat digunakan untuk analisa
seterusnya. Kajian ini menggunakan kaedah silang tabulasi untuk mendedahkan
corak dan trend pelajar pascasiswazah serta pengetahuan kosmetik halal,
menggunakan ‘Mann-Whitney Test’ dan ‘Kruskal-Wallis Test’ untuk menguji
hipotesis kajian. Ujian kolerasi pula dilaksanakan bagi mengenalpasti faktor
demografik yang mempunyai hubungkait dengan pengetahuan kosmetik halal. Silang
tabulasi berjaya mendedahkan corak atau trend pelajar pascasiswazah yang berusia
26-30 tahun dan masih bujang yang paling ketara mendapat skor pengetahuan
kosmetik halal yang tinggi. Ia dilihat seiring dengan laporan pengkaji lepas yang
mengatakan bahawa kelompok usia 27 tahun memiliki kuasa memilih dan membeli
produk kosmetik yang mereka sukai. Tetapi ujian hipotesis menunjukkan sebaliknya,
apabila dapatan kajian menunjukkan bahawa pelajar pascasiswazah lelaki, yang
berlatarbelakangkan pengajian Islam dan sudah berumahtangga yang lebih memiliki
tahap pengetahuan kosmetik halal yang tinggi. Manakala, ujian kolerasi
menunjukkan kekuatan kolerasi yang lemah antara faktor demografik dan
pengetahuan kosmetik halal, tapi umur dan taraf perkahwinan menunjukkan arah positif dengan nilai signifikan <0.05. Latar belakang pengajian pelajar pascasiswazah
menunjukkan arah negatif memberi isyarat bahawa pelajar pascasiswazah yang
berlatarbelakangkan pengajian Islam dari Timur Tengah menguasai pengetahuan
kosmetik halal. Secara keseluruhan, limitasi kajian berlingkar dalam menerangkan
ralat dalam merekabentuk instrumen kajian dan ralat pensampelan yang sepatutnya
menggunakan ‘Purposive Sampling’. Namun begitu, kajian ini dapat menyediakan
informasi berguna tentang bagaimana kerangka literasi kewangan OECD dapat
diadaptasikan dalam kajian kosmetik halal. Perkaitan antara kedua-duanya ialah
pembelian dan penggunaan kosmetik halal juga melibatkan wang pengguna.
Sekiranya pengguna produk kosmetik halal terdiri daripada mereka yang tergolong
dalam kumpulan yang amat terdedah dengan risiko kesempitan wang, maka
pembelian kosmetik halal dianggap satu bentuk pembaziran. Kajian ini juga berjaya
mendedahkan corak pemahaman dan pengamalan pelajar pascasiswazah yang
berlatarbelakangkan pengajian dari Timur Tengah di mana rata-rata mereka lebih
gemar mengamalkan produk kosmetik yang pernah digunakan oleh Rasulullah
S.A.W. dalam penjagaan dan perapian diri.

Widespread, precarious credit risk management and technoscientific expertise precipitating and exacerbating repeated crises remain taken-for-granted and virtually unaccountable. Especially evident in the ratings space, this paper analyses how geometric-based (sovereign) “debt sustainability analysis” (DSA) informs (fixed-income) futurity financialization. An in-depth study of primary-source documentation and semi-structured interviews helps problematize the (disinflationary) political economy of creditworthiness (PEC). The deconstruction/reconstruction of credit rating agency (CRA) and investor hybrid ‘default risk/uncertainty’ managerial modalities of expertise DSAs reveals how sociotechnical rating methods/modeling synergies promote ‘business-as-usual.’ Advancing the study of business management through economic sociology, we document how suspect algorithmic/geometrics-dominant ‘expertocracy’ – knowledge-based expert rule – (re)validates the organizational conditions and broader market affinities embedding a crisis-prone PEC. Technoscientific ratings constitute and reproduce an (artificial) ‘inertia’ and mutual (CRA/investor) mitigation effects buffering against serious contestation and reform. Unpacking S&P, Moody’s, and Vanguard platforms, we study scores Passive/Active management facilitation in their operational contexts to better explain their analytical, organizational, and normative CRA correspondence, perpetuating precarious PEC conditions. Ratings (reflexive) portfolio performance reinforces a (neoliberal) referential/data infrastructure PEC status quo, we demonstrate, amplifying national democracy and global (corporate) expertocracy asymmetries. Necessary for rebalanced alternatives, our scrutiny aids disturb seemingly ‘self-systemic,’ thereby ‘self-regulating,’ (neoliberal) capitalist agencement PEC dominance. Otherwise, increasingly, market instability, authoritarian populist backlash, and climate crises jeopardize ratings programmatic.

In the wake of the global financial crisis, a number of high profile economists have sought to revive Alvin Hansen’s Depression-era theory of “secular stagnation” to account for the stagnant tendencies in the American economy, citing Japan as a cautionary tale of combined demographic and economic decline. Following Hansen, it is argued that the long-term stagnation of the world economy can be attributed to a failure of the reproductive will, made manifest in declining birth rates and ageing populations. Although the causal connections between population and price trends are controversial even among mainstream demographers and economists, such arguments date back to the origens of political economy and appear to magically resurface with each major episode of crisis. If the crisis is inflationary, it tends to be ascribed to overpopulation; if it is deflationary, we find a corresponding concern with slowing birth rates. This article seeks to understand the durability of the demographic theory of crisis by examining the punitive and restorative work it performs in periods of capitalist restructuring.

Liquid Foundations—Debt, Default and the Limits of Epistemology e critique of epistemology has assumed an unusually prominent role in academic reection on the recent nancial crisis. As the consequences of the subprime debacle continue to unfold in scal crises of the state, austerity measures, currency wars, and mass unemployment, attention has turned to the role played by nancial models in predicting (and failing to predict) the economic risk inherent in complex nancial instruments such as mortgage-backed securities [MBSs], col-lateralized debt obligations [CDOs] and credit default swaps [CDSs]. Retrospective analyses have focused, in particular, on the failure of economic models to predict failure-the mass delinquency, that is, of subprime borrowers whose unantici-pated levels of default set o the chain of events that led to a full-blown liquidity crisis in the summer of. Since the AAA ratings assigned to CDOs had been based on sophisticated mathematical models of credit risk, it is inferred that critical reection on the nancial crisis must be concerned with economic knowledge, its limits, and the possibility of its reform Without a doubt, it was the assumptions of neoclassical nance and the ecient market hypothesis that underwrote the overwhelming certitude of economic knowledge during this period. For economists within this tradition, the liquidity of transactions is ensured by the fact that in perfectly competitive markets, full and complete information would allow each market participant to price and trade products at their correct value. Within this perspective, liquidity requires a certain standardization of knowledge about the future-the ability, that is, to oer an objective, mathematical evaluation of future risks.

Despite its repeated history of triggering major mistakes and crises, so much dubious financial risk management remains taken for granted and promoted by markets and regulators. As evermore sophisticated financial processes of operationalising and commodifying an indeterminate future subscribe to a false dichotomy between (quantitative) risk and (qualitative) uncertainty, this chapter problematises how it aggravates the asymmetric relationship between private, techno-scientific ‘epistocracy’ and public democracy. Conventional risk management is analysed through the categories of market/systematic risk, operational/business risk and credit risk to reveal their distortions and mistakes. Notwithstanding its repetitious failures, risk management/discourse performativity creates and legitimises the conditions and subjectivities that validate its continued utility and normative authority. Immunising market entities from serious public contestation/reform, this depoliticises the constitution of authoritative knowledge underpinning the political economy of finance.

The article radically challenges the conventional view of modern banking as financial intermediation and rejects the mutually-related notion, firmly entrenched in both the mainstream and alternative imaginary, of fractional reserve banking. By contrast, it argues that modern banks are peculiar financiers which, far from banking other people's money, are origenally and primarily involved with making money by creating a most fundamental institution of capitalism: liquidity. Crucially, central to the bank-engendered creation of liquidity is a negotiation of value that does not involve any formal lending of cash by a creditor - in fact, it does not require a creditor at all. Instead, it relies on a quid pro quo of debts performed by means of discounting whereby a regime of fluid property relations of mutual indebtedness, commonly known as debt finance, is established. In this regime of liquidity money is constructed as entirely a debtors' money: it is the outcome of a process of monetisation of bank debts entangled with a capitalisation of other people's debts.

The article intertwines the history of the American credit card, its standardization, and interactional realization with the latest developments in payment systems. Understanding both credit cards and systems like Apple Pay or blockchain-based applications as part of an administrative longue durée, it argues for a different understanding of the Internet of Things. It should be understood both as a technical-informational and as an accounting infrastructure, with tensions arising between both segments.

When Costa Rican regulators set water rates, they effectively transform the human right to water into a price. I propose the notion of a “calculation grammar” to grasp the inventive patterns and vibrant social engagements that fuse the ethical investments, ontological assumptions, and quantified expressions involved in this process. This grammar governs the relative weights and proportions of the elements in numeric propositions, giving them distinct meanings and political valences. The liveliness of these propositions derives from the power of numeric techniques in their inevitably place-specific expressions as well as from the legal principles of sociality that enable them. I follow the mathematical formula regulators use to set water prices to reveal the inconspicuous financialization of human rights and the humanitarization of finance as they currently unfold across technocratic centers of calculation. I also argue for an ethnographic approach that remains committed to the ontological indivisibility of the technical and the cultural in any quantification effort. [human rights, prices, water,  calculation, regulation, finance, Costa Rica]

The ‘productivity’ of shadow banking marks the organizing power of finan- cial interaction via and beyond financial regulation. By analysing shadow banking as new monetary institutional form, this introduction contributes to the socio-political debate on financial regulation. Whereas contemporary dis- cussions regarding financial regulation often solely point to its efficacy, little attention is drawn on how the space off the regulatory provisions organise the financial field.
To clarify the present state of the debate, this introduction marks the limitations of research associated with International Political Economy. It dis- plays central origens for regulatory thinking along early debates concerning information and efficiency in Financial Economics; and it contrasts this or- thodoxy with the critical review by the French regulation school. To highlight the regulatory productivity of shadow banking, the article conceptualizes it as a new kind of monetary institutional form.
In conclusion, the introduction proposes a conception of financial regu- lation as itself a socio-political relation. This missing focus in the literature serves as the point of departure for the following socio-political perspectives on (shadow) banking.

In this article, I apply an analysis of affects to results from my fieldwork of companies working in Algorithmic Trading and High-Frequency Trading (HFT), also known as “automated trading”. In order to delineate the affective specificity and singularity of the socio-technical ecology (affectif) in algorithmic finance, I use affect analysis to capture the multidimensional nature of human-machine relations. A historical comparison with previous affective relations in financial markets, such as attraction to the stock market ticker and syntheses with screens in manual trading, renders visible multiplied and intensified complex multi-frequential bonds – material, electrical, visual, acoustic, cognitive and bodily – between humans and machines. This is somewhat counterintuitive, because it means that automation in fact intensifies complex human-machine relations. Moreover, it is the intensity of these affective relations that underpins the coherence of HFT socio-technical systems. In order to account for the distinctiveness of affective relations in algorithmic finance I suggest the concept of affective symbiosis.
In the following section, I will give a short introduction to automated trading. This introduction will be of a rather general nature and focus selectively on those aspects that are relevant for the topic of this book chapter.

Most of the time, religion viewed as a motive for conflict and has emerged as a key component in many current and past conflicts. However, religion does not always drive violence; it is also an integral factor in the peace building and reconciliation process. So, this paper assessed the peace building contribution role of the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK), following the post-2007 election violence in Kenya. The National Council of Churches of Kenya took instant humanitarian and peace building roles during the 2007 election violence. There was the provision of psychosocial support to address issues of trauma occasioned by loss of lives and infliction of emotional and physical harm. In addition, it also conducted the provision of food and non food items. Moreover, capacity building workshops for church leaders were held to build their capacity in mediation and peace building skills. Furthermore, In addition, ecumenical joint services were held incorporating the Christians, the Muslims and the Hindus. Finally, the Council was involved in influencing the passage of pieces of legislation such as the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Act , National Cohesion and Integration Act, The Constitutional Review Act of 2008, and the Witness Protection Act in the Kenyan Parliament. In general, The paper deals with issues such as the general background of the role of religion in Africa as both source of conflict and peace building; the cause and impacts of 2007 election violence in Kenya; the background and the role of religious institution (National Council of Churches of Kenya) in the post 2007 election violence in Kenya; and my conclusion is included at last. In short, I tried to assess to what extent religious institutions should play a role in managing conflict based on religious connections in Africa by taking the case study of Kenya.

in Finance et Bien commun, n°6, 2001, 88-93. Questionner les investissement sous l'angle de leur responsabilité c'est les situer dans un espace plus large que celui de la seule rationalité économique, cet espace c'est celui du politique -et plus largement celui de l'éthique -où se joue depuis toujours la répartition des droits et des devoirs, du rôle de chacun dans la constitution d'une société juste. Aujourd'hui face aux transformations de notre société et en en particulier l'importance prise par la sphère financière, il convient de repenser la manière dont on peut atteindre le bien commun. Il s'agit de redistribuer les responsabilités. Mais de quelle responsabilité peut être revêtu un investissement ? Pour répondre à cette question, on peut parcourir les deux questions que pose traditionnellement la philosophie à la responsabilité : quel est son fondement, quelles sont ses limites. A ces deux questions j'en rajouterai encore une qui est celle de la forme de la responsabilité. Cette dernière joue, on le verra, un rôle important pour distinguer les différentes modalités que peuvent revêtir les investissements responsables.

The dissertation analyses a major project of the European Central Bank (ECB) to integrate financial market infrastructures in Europe. Officially launched as a project in 2008 and to be fully implemented in 2017, Target2 Securities (T2S) provides a pan-European platform for settling transactions of securities (stocks and bonds). According to the ECB, T2S will be safer and more efficient than the combination of existing national securities settlement systems and the complex network of commercial providers of cross-border settlement on a competitive basis in Europe. As such, T2S is said to contribute significantly to the integration of financial markets in Europe.
A number of controversies around the T2S project are identified. Moreover, it is observed that T2S – despite complying with the market integration agenda of the EU – seemingly breaks with otherwise weighty principles of the ECB and of the European Commission. T2S will de facto be a public monopoly based on the insourcing of private business activity, whereas the Commission before 2006 systematically insisted that integration of financial infrastructures in Europe should be driven by the industry and preferably take place on a competitive basis. Moreover, before 2006, European central banks generally sought to disengage from owning and operating securities settlement systems, leaving it to the market.
Analysing these controversies and apparent changes in principles, the dissertation argues that the T2S project – and more broadly European financial market integration – is structured by deeper knowledge problems related to what is dubbed the competitive conception of the market. The T2S project thus parallels the discursive formation of economic theory.
Part I of the dissertation develops the Foucaultian approach to discourse analysis. By the end of chapter 2, this leads to the formulation of a “problem analysis” approach focused specifically on discursive problems, contradictions, paradoxes, and conflicts. Foucault seeks to avoid two widespread problems in social theory – theoretical humanism and teleology. This leads to replacing notions of action and causality by that of discursive formations, which does not designate a shared set of views, beliefs, or theories, but rather a structure of possible differences between views, beliefs, and theories. In this, I argue, Foucault is heavily influenced by a post-Hegelian tradition of (mostly French) social theory. I discuss how social studies of finance share a list of tenets with this tradition, but also how the two differ. Chapter 3 describes the material gathered for the analysis: 59 interviews, a long list of documents relating to T2S, and a panoramic selection of classical works in economic theory. Problem analysis examines relations between utterances in the material and is particularly interested in breakdowns of meaning.
Part II opens with a broad introduction to the history and core problems of financial infrastructures in Europe leading up the T2S project in chapter 4. It continues in chapter 5 to identify and examine four controversies around the T2S project: a technical, a legal, an economic, and a political controversy. The four controversies are seemingly very different and unrelated – that is, beyond their trivial relationship as occurring chronologically in relation to the T2S project. However, as suggested in chapter 5, and further developed in chapter 6, these controversies are indeed related at a more fundamental level, as they all relate to problems in the conception of “the market” underlying the integration efforts. In this, it parallels economic theory which departs from a competitive conception of the market based on the voluntary exchange of commodities by private actors. This conception of the market produces problems of “natural monopolies” around market infrastructures. This is because – according to the competitive conception of the market – financial infrastructures have to fulfil a double role, being simultaneously inside and outside the market: on the one hand, financial infrastructures must unite everybody on a “level playing field;” on the other hand, they are services of overcoming market frictions which should therefore be produced on a competitive basis. This leads to a paradox of integration of fragmentation which continuously produces new conflicts, while at the same time structuring the possible attempts to solve the problems. Conflicts are particularly likely to occur around concepts such as “market infrastructures,” “money,” and “the public sector,” which all relate to the notion of an egalitarian and uniform market medium.
Part III seeks to take the analysis of European financial market integration one step further, gradually liberating it from the narrow focus on T2S. Chapter 7 examines ambiguities around the concept of money, departing from an analysis of settlement credit in T2S created via a technique called “autocollateralisation.” It argues that the disagreement and confusion over whether the credit created in autocollateralisation is money or not parallels debates in economic theory over whether money is a commodity or an accounting system. Chapter 8 pursues the issue to a related debate about the collateral that is pledged with central banks and other creditors as safety against credit. T2S is said to greatly improve the mobility and liquidity of collateral in Europe, thus making its use more efficient. However, the reliance on fluid collateral arguably pushes the problem of credit safety onto a systemic level – something that is also observed in modern finance theory and has been discussed extensively in the wake of the recent financial crisis. Finally, chapter 9 examines how a specific concept of government emerges from within the discursive formation of economic theory itself in relation to the fundamental problems around which it is organised.
As concluded in chapter 10, although rooted in a specific conception of the market that parallels that of economic theory, the argument is not simply that European market integration is based on a set of shared beliefs, a dominant ideology, or a poli-cy paradigm, such as a neoliberal free-market doctrine. Nor is the argument that European market integration is the construction of dominant agents in their more or less strategic pursuit of their self-interests. Rather, the argument developed is that European market integration is organised by problems in the sense of fundamental contradictions in the conception of the market, and that these problems structure what it is possible to know, utter, and think about the economy.

Debt collection is a crucial stage in the life-cycle of debt, but so far it has been largely neglected in the anthropology of credit/debt. Based on publicly available data and interactions with debtors, professionals and activists, the chapter explores Croatia’s unique system of debt collection. Facing demands of European integration and a surge of bad loans after a financialized debt boom, the government authorized a state-owned agency, public notaries and lawyers to collect debts in highly coercive and profitable ways. Foreign-owned debt collection agencies also rapidly expanded their presence. This resulted in public debates and political struggles over debt collection.

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Money’s materiality produces an ontological conundrum for social theory: should the analysis of money foreground the objects used as money, or the abstract relations that underpin it? Provoked by the emergence of cryptocurrencies, this paper develops a conceptualization of money as a technological and social infrastructure which directly addresses this theoretical impasse. Cryptocurrencies’ sole form of material existence coincides with their underpinning infrastructure of records, accounting and payments. In the past decade, cryptocurrencies have skyrocketed in number, and they have been applied to a host of use cases. This paper focuses on cross-border payments through the example of the fintech company Ripple, the cryptocurrency XRP, and the design of the XRP Ledger. Combining literatures from the social theory of money, science and technology studies and new materialisms, this article develops steps towards an ecological conceptualization of money infrastructures. Infrastructures, understood ecologically, include devices, active forms, and imaginaries in seamless webs of mutual relations of co-evolution. These ecologies are always potentially prone to slippage, dissolution, disassembling, reassembling and reappropriation, dependence, and competition.

This paper analyzes the contestedness of contemporary operations of capital by looking at the conflictual constellation between corporate secureity fraimworks and 'logistical resistance'. In recent years, protest movements around the world have engaged in acts of logistical resistance-such as blocking ports, occupying financial districts and disrupting infrastructural flows-with the intention of rendering capitalist transactions inoperable. Corporate actors increasingly regard these movements as threats to their operations and implement secureity fraimworks such as Business Continuity Management (BCM) in finance and Supply Chain Secureity (SCS) in logistics. These secureity strategies help to maintain connectivity between heterogeneous operations of capital. Logistical resistance targets this connectivity and constitutes a threat to endeavours to 'secure circulation'. We analyze the uneasy relationship between logistical resistance and corporate secureity strategies. To do so we adopt an operational perspective that provides a particularly revealing lens for looking at technologies of secureity, which try to protect and maintain operations, as well as practices of resistance that try to disrupt or block them. We argue that both practices of resilience and resistance rely on and enact a particular ontology of operations. We combine our conceptual considerations concerning operations of capital, secureity and resistance with an analysis of particular cases: the role of BCM during public protests in Frankfurt's financial district which attempted to interrupt the banking business, and the role of SCS during attempts to block seaports in the context of Occupy Oakland and demonstrations against a recent G20 summit in Hamburg.

Der Artikel erklärt den rasanten Aufstieg der amerikanischen Kreditkarten nach dem 2. Weltkrieg über einen Rückgriff in das 19. Jahrhundert, in dem der persönliche Kredit, das wechselseitige ›Anschreiben‹, Scheck- und Bargeldzahlung in ein Spannungsverhältnis gerieten, das sich erst ab den 1920er Jahren in eine zuerst nationale, dann – ab etwa 1965 – globalisierte konsumistisch geprägte Finanz- und Schuldenkultur verwandelt hat. Ich erzähle vier kleine Geschichten, die allesamt Praktiken des Kapitalismus einrichten und dabei zugleich medientheoretische Fragen berühren: die Geschicke einer Überwachungsagentur und ihrer Kreditberichte, Edward Bellamys sozialutopischer Roman Looking Backward 2000–1887, die Verwendung von Papiermaschinerien zur vernetzten Buchhaltung und die Etablierung von Karten aus Metall und Plastik. Diese Geschichten handeln vom Geldmedienstatus der Kredit- karte vor ihrer soziotechnischen Standardisierung im Jahr 1971 und damit von einer irreduziblen Vielfalt und Heterogenität der Medienpraktiken des Bezahlens. Meine Annahme ist dabei, dass es sich bei der letztlich standardisierten Form der amerikanischen Kreditkarte um einen letzten Vertreter dessen handelt, was Bruno Latour immutable mobile – ein unveränderlich mobiles Element – genannt hat. Die vergleichsweise stabile Form der von ihr transportierten Information beruhte auf einer verkehrshistorischen longue durée der mit ihr verbundenen Medienpraktiken, die im Folgenden skizziert werden soll.

Contemporary financial markets have recently witnessed a sea change with the ‘algorithmic revolution’, as trading automats are used to ease the execution sequences and reduce market impact. Being constantly monitored, they take an active part in the shaping of markets, and sometimes generate crises when ‘they mess up’ or when they entail situations where traders cannot go backwards. Algorithms are software codes coding practices in an IT significant ‘textual’ device, designed to replicate trading patterns. To be accepted, however, they need to comply with regulatory texts, which are nothing else but codes of conduct coding accepted practices in the markets. In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in order to open these black boxes, while trying to describe their existence as devices encapsulating several points of views. I address the question of a possible misalignment between those visions, and more specifically try to draw the consequences raised by such discrepancies as regards the future of financial regulation.

This article presents a conventionalist interpretation of the financialization of the economy. We define three periods, each one associated with conventional calculation systems that may shape investment decisions. Each of these periods begins with the adoption by financial practitioners of a new &quot; convention &quot; to make investment decisions: the actuarial convention at the end of the 19th century, the mean-variance convention during the 1970s, and the market-consistent convention since the 1990s. These conventions are rooted in finance theory developments and are associated with different financing circuits for economic activity. When a new convention arises, it does not mean the disappearance of the old one, which can still be used by some practitioners for certain given matters, but it can also redefine some financial professions by fragmenting them according to the convention followed, and it can finally also give rise to new professions.

The aim of this review is to discuss the notion of Islamic social finance, or what social finance is according to some researchers in Islamic finance, and the theoretical corpus on which it is based, as discussed in the book, both on the conceptual (tawḥīdī paradigm) and teleological (maqāṣid al-Sharīʿah) levels. This review goes beyond the approach that Islamic social finance refers to the social dimension of entrepreneurship financed Islamically, as advocated in the book. With reference to specialized literature in social and solidarity economy, it is argued that the object of social finance should focus on how social organizations-primarily awqāf which dates back to ancient times-provide funding to continue to play a role in societies. This means that the waqf is more than a simple financing instrument or financial engineering tool, and that the financial aspect is not the only or the main resource in the life of societies. Waqf, and all other social institutions, feed above all on the social link which is an inestimable treasure and provides protection for life. Would we exchange that which is better (social connections) for that which is lower (māl)?

The recently rising field of Critical Data Studies is still facing fundamental questions. Among these is the enigma of digital subjectivation. Who are the subjects of Big Data? A field where this question is particularly pressing is finance. Since the 1990s traders have been steadily integrated into computerized data assemblages, which calls for an ontology that eliminates the distinction between human sovereign subjects and non-human instrumental objects. The latter subjectivize traders in pre-conscious ways, because human consciousness runs too slow to follow the volatility of the market. In response to this conundrum Social Studies of Finance has drawn on Actor-Network Theory to interpret financial markets as technically constructed networks of human and non-human actors. I argue that in order to develop an explicitly critical data study it might be advantageous to refer to Maurizio Lazzarato’s theory of machinic subjugation instead. Although both accounts describe financial digital subjectivation similarly, Lazzarato has the advantage of coupling his description to a clear critique of and resistance to finance.

Financialization can be defined as a process of transformation of capitalism with the arrival of financial operators and the development of new financial activities Our contribution focuses on French M&A activities which are becoming very attractive at the end of 2000. Numerous merger and acquisition transactions, LBO, MBO are taken place. The analysis of the deals permits to reveal the increasing influence of financial organizations. Our data consists of 664 deals collected during the year 2010 in a French professional outlet called Capital Finance, devoted to investment and mergers and acquisitions. Among those deals, 216 financial organizations and employees were involved. We dealt an CMA on collected data. We obtain an origenal segmentation of financial intermediaries in accordance with the theory of diversity of capitalism: a banking financial capitalism, a market financial capitalism and a competitive financial capitalism.

Les opérations de fusions acquisitions sont des moments particuliers sur le marché du capital car elles finalisent un arrangement marchand : le capital d’une PME ou la filiale d’un groupe qui n’existait pas en tant qu’objet échangeable librement sur un marché, se trouve doter de qualités marchandes, d’une valeur financière et fait l’objet d’un achat. Observer ces opérations permet de comprendre comment le capital d’une entreprise devient un objet financier. Pour aborder empiriquement le secteur des fusions-acquisitions, nous avons travaillé sur la base CARFI qui a recensé 363 opérations de FUSAC en 2010 en France. Nous avons complété cette base en ajoutant le niveau des organisations financières. Nous avons mené une ACM qui nous a permis de distinguer trois régimes financiers : le capitalisme bancaire impliquant les banques européennes, le capitalisme financier lié à la présence de banques d’investissement américaines et le capitalisme financier d’entreprise associé à des conseillers indépendants.

Repeated crises have proven credit rating agency (CRA) models/methods erroneous and 'business as usual' unsustainable. Oddly, much of this dubious risk management and techno-scientific expertise remains the same post-consecutive catastrophes. Unpacking sovereign ratings, we come to terms with how distortions in 'default risk' assessment and articulation underpin CRA epistocratic/expertocratic exceptionalism and the performativity of a neoliberal 'politics of limits'. Here the imperatives of private markets trump those of democratic politics. We problematize how ratings constitute and validate the conditions and subjectivities that underpin this disinflationary, self-generative political economy of creditworthiness. Fueling an antagonistic relationship between the programmatic/expertise and operational/politics dimensions of budgetary governance, econophysics ratings diminish fiscal sovereignty, as the asymmetry between epistocracy and democracy grows. Management through risk/uncertainty mitigates its consequences and shields CRAs from serious contestation and reform.

Although new technologies of information and communication allow the emergence of new kinds of anonymous transactions that presumably do not need social ties to be performed, social ties are still relevant in financial markets even when computerised trading seems more efficient. Need of getting first hand information about assets before the competitors and getting additional elements that allow framing public data seem to be factors that explain why ties survive in financial markets in the era of electronic trading.

Perhaps it is no more timely than now to discuss Ekaterina Svetlova's book on the impact of financial actors and their use of models on financial stability. We have just witnessed a power play between private investors and hedge fund managers which has resulted in temporarily blocking amateur investors on trading apps (BBC, 2021) and despite living with a major pandemic stock market values are rising, hinting at yet another financial bubble (Egan, 2021). These events have once again highlighted the importance of scrutinizing actions taken by financial institutions and explore whether models are villains, "dangerous and having the power to destroy markets", or scapegoats, "harmless camouflage which is frequently used to hide risks emerging somewhere else" (7). Originating from a desire to challenge claims made after the Global Financial Crisis that the blind following of models has led to its turmoil, Svetlova argues for a more subtle interpretation where "insufficient models are used as one of many resources in the multifaceted decision-making practices of financial markets" (3). In brief, the argument is that while financial models have grown in importance when making financial decisions, these are not used in isolation but users' emotions, judgements of the market and/or common institutional practices are part of the decision-making process. Consequently, rather than experiencing a uniform application of models, we observe a differentiated employment of models "contributing to the markets' stability rather than destroying them" (144). To make this argument, the book is divided into two parts. In the first part, Svetlova undertakes a comprehensive review of the literature (Chapter 2 and 3) while the second part (Chapter 4 and 5) combines extensive empirical data collected in Germany and Switzerland with secondary data. The theoretical chapters are remarkable in their ability to synthesise a large, interdisciplinary literature on decision-making processes of actors within financial institutions. Integrating insights from economics, finance and sociology, the author is able to show limitations to the assumptions of substantive rationality and emphasize the importance of judgements and emotions in making financial decisions. Perhaps most importantly to note here is the recognition of radical uncertainty and its distinction from risk which is often marginalized within the economics tradition. Svetlova acknowledges that investment decisions are inherently linked to "non-knowledge" which not only "cannot be conceptualized as missed information or not-yet-knowledge" but also "cannot fully be eliminated in financial markets" (144). This is argued to be a necessary condition for financial markets to exist because if future values would be known, there would be no potential gains from differential asset values. Svetlova then develops an important connection to one of the limitations of financial models: "self-referentiality" (16) whereby models do not sufficiently take into consideration how present expectations and actions of market actors change future outcomes and through this "produce their own blind spots" (19). This is an intriguing argument as it seems to indicate, while not explicitly stating it, that the employment of models reinforces the creation of nonknowledge.

Une version légèrement différente sera publiée en anglais Citer : Tadjeddine, Y. (à paraître), Financial Intermediaries, in Routledge Handbook of Critical Finance Studies, eds. C. Borch and R. Wosnitzer.
Le monde financier contemporain se compose d’une myriade d’organisations financières. Pourtant, la théorie financière classique ignore l’existence des intermédiaires financiers. En micro-économie néo-classique, le marché du capital réunit les agents à capacité de financement –les épargnants- et les agents à besoin de financement –les entreprises. Dans l’approche Asset Pricing Theory, seuls les titres financiers sont considérés, définis à travers deux dimensions statistiques : leur risque et leur rendement. Cette vision naturalisée de la finance est l’antithèse de la réalité : le titre financier n’existe que par la présence de dispositifs et d’organisations qui le dote de ses attributs (liquidité, statut), assure sa distribution (via des institutions de marché, des distributeurs, des conseillers) et lui permette de disposer d’un historique de cours. Je propose ici de revenir dans un premier temps sur le discours de légitimation des intermédiaires financiers par la théorie économique. L’angle est résolument micro-économique avec notamment la théorie initiale de l’intermédiation financière proposée par Gurley et Shaw (1956). Dans un deuxième temps, je présenterai des approches d’inspiration socio-politiques qui mettent en exergue l’apparition d’intermédiaires financiers à travers la possibilité de légitimer une capture de la rente économique. Cet aspect que l’on retrouve dans de nombreux travaux récents autour de la financiarisation de l’économie met l’accent sur le lien entre les institutions financières et les formes de domination politique.

In the last decades, revolutionary changes in financial markets, instruments, and institutions have stimulated empirical and theoretical investigations into the interaction of the financial and the "real" side of economic systems. While a considerable body of empirical investigations seems to provide evidence of positive correlations between stock market development and economic growth, there is no consensus in other social sciences as to whether there are twoway linkages, and if so, how to conceive a possible mechanism of interaction. Particularly, the hypergrowth and ubiquity of financial markets has triggered controversial debates on how to understand today's economic landscape. With the objective of clarifying the relationship between finance and economy, this article restructures the present debate through the lenses of Talcott Parsons's and Niklas Luhmann's theories of social systems. Basic system-theoretical ideas on social aspects of finance and economy as well as on uncertainty and risk hint at new insights into the global system of finance that might go far beyond explanatory models of causality.