Today, financial exchanges represent a massive proportion of the globe’s economic activity, especially in highly “developed” nations, where financial services has emerged as among the most “productive” sectors of the economy. Yet the primary product and medium of this “industry” is immaterial, speculative and promissory: the manipulation of risk, probability, market differentials, insurance and, essentially, belief. While defenders of the sector might claim that all these digital financial ephemera are merely the good-faith representations of real-world wealth, the truth is that financial assets are, in large part, imaginary. But imaginary, in my reading, does not mean unreal.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 29