It is no exaggeration to say that, since the 2008 crisis, there has been an explosion of academic interest in the financial sector, its periodic crises, and the impacts and implications of both for society at large. I started my own research into finance capital in 2005, and it was my great misfortune to be trying to complete a PhD thesis on the topic as a monumental and historical financial crisis unfolded, in a time when, every week, new analyzes of the very sector I was looking at were emerging from nearly all political and disciplinary quarters. The only option, really, was to continue with the lines of inquiry with which I had begun: how do we account for not only the tremendous power of financial wealth in a moment of neoliberal globalization (see Bryan and Rafferty 2006; Lapavitsas 2013; LiPuma and Lee 2004), but also the fact that what is perhaps the most powerful and pervasive economic force in human history is made up of what are, at first glance, imaginary assets? After all, the fabled credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations at the core of the 2007/2008 meltdown were, essentially, made up. Sure, they referred back to “real” assets in terms of the homes owned by subprime borrowers, but, as financiers and the rest of us were to learn as the crisis unfolded, the value ascribed to these assets was dramatically less than the price at which these financial instruments circulated. In other words, there is something profoundly and tantalizingly cultural about contemporary finance capital, about the way confidence, belief, identity and rhetoric are rolled into an evolving economic landscape dominated by themes of speculation, immateriality and communication.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 64