The void in finance

There is no proper place within economic thought for the void. It appears nowhere in the canonical texts of political economy, let alone the discourse of conventional economics. Yet one cannot shake the sense that it is implied in most if not all financial commentary. At the very least, the void exerts a magnetic pull on a range of related terms in the lexicon. Could it be that through these it grounds the financial imagination in fundamental ways

Edges of the financial imagination

Neither external nor internal to finance, the financial imagination marks out a space where the theoretical and practical aspects of finance come together in the inner life of the subject. That means there is something about financial subjectivity that escapes a functional view on the imagination. The purpose of this forum is to probe the contours of the financial imagination in terms of its perimeters and blind spots, its fantasies and delusions

Journal Staff

SammanfattningOCS950(Object Controller System 950) är en av Bombardiers produkter som hanterar säkerhetssystemet i järnvägstrafiken. Det består av olika delsystem och strömförsörjs mha nätaggregat (PSU – Power Supply Unit). I den här rapporten undersöks den befintliga PSU74-modellen samt nya switchade nätaggregat som finns på marknaden.Bakgrunden till att Bombardier vill byta ut PSU74 mot ett nytt switchat aggregat är att PSU74 har en vikt på 14 kg och tar stor plats i el-skåp. Ett swichat nätaggregat väger ungefär 1,5 kg och är så pass kompakt att det tar litet utrymme i el-skåpet.Bombardier har medvetet väntat med att gå över till SMPS eftersom tillförlitlighet blir ett problem. Detta problem kan lösas mha redundanta kopplingar. MTBF är den största utmaningen vid övergång till SMPS. MTBF beräkningar för redundanta kopplingar presenteras i rapporten och resultatet visar att ju fler enheter ett system innehåller desto mindre blir MTBF-värdet.I faktainsamlingsdelen beskrivs och förklaras olika viktiga begrepp för att underlätta förståelse av rapporten. MTBF, linjära och switchade nätaggregat är bara några begrepp som tas upp.En studie av PSU74 och en lista över dess viktiga egenskaper presenteras, det är en utgångspunkt för kravspecifikation för nytt switchade nätaggregat. Vissa egenskaper som prioriteras är MTBF, in-och utspänning, vikt och drifttemperatur mm.Ett enkelt kretsschema konstrueras och visar principen för redundant koppling. Kravspecifikationen finns i ett tabellformat. De flesta egenskaper är definierade men vissa är ej fastställta. Bombardier definierar värde på dessa egenskaper efter diskussion med potentiella tillverkare.En alternativ lösning presenteras där ett uppvärmningsförslag av el-skåp läggs fram. Denna metod kan bredda urval av SMPS på marknaden. En omfattad undersökning av marknaden genomförs där olika modeller analyseras baserade på kravspecifikationer. En utmaning är omgivningstemperaturen eftersom de  flesta SMPS tål – 25°C minimum drifttemperatur. Några modeller som uppfyller kriterierna undersöks noggrant och systematiskt. Analys av utvalda SMPS utförs och slutsatser presenteras där för- och nackdelar med respektive modell lyfts fram. Det konstanteras att modell från Cosel TUFS300F28 är ett bra alternativ för ersättning av PSU74

Clickbait Capitalism: A Panel Discussion

The Centre for Capitalism Studies is pleased to welcome panellists Carolyn Biltoft (Graduate Institute Geneva), Earl Gammon (Sussex), Emily Rosamond (Goldsmiths) and Amin Samman (City). Chaired by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou (CCS Director)

Clickbait capitalism: Economies of desire in the twenty-first century

Panel for 14th Annual Critical Finance Studies Conference Organiser • Amin Samman, City, University of London Chair • Elke Schwarz, Queen Mary University of London Panellists • Amin Samman, City, University of London • Earl Gammon, University of Sussex • Sandy Hager, City, University of London • Emily Rosamond, Goldsmiths, University of London Panel abstract The notion of ‘clickbait’ speaks to the intersection of money, technology, and desire, suggesting a cunning ruse to profit from unsavoury inclinations of one kind or another. This panel pursues the idea that the entire contemporary economy is just such a ruse; an elaborate exercise in psychological capture and release. Pushing beyond rationalist accounts of economic life, the papers presented here put psychoanalysis and political economy into conversation with the cutting edges of capitalist development. Perennial questions of death, sex, aggression, enjoyment, despair, hope, and revenge are followed onto the terrain of the contemporary, with discussion devoted to social media, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs. The result will be a unique and compelling portrait of the latest institutions to stage, channel, or reconfigure the psychic energies of political and economic life

After the boom:Finance and society studies in the 2020s and beyond

The crisis of 2008 was a watershed event for the study of finance and society. There was the boom in financial markets that came to a head with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and there was the boom in financial scholarship that followed in its wake. But what comes after this second boom? After more than decade of rapid expansion under the shadow of 2008, what comes next for the new finance studies? What are the emerging debates that matter most? Where lies the need for further theorisation and for new empirical work? In this editorial, these questions are pursued under three broad headings, each corresponding to an overarching imperative: first, the need to keep a vigilant watch on the core institutions and logics of finance; second, the need to continue expanding and deepening the field; and third, the need to persist with difficult lines of questioning

Conjuring the spirit of multilateralism: Histories of crisis management during the ‘great credit crash’

In recent years critical scholars have emphasised how the recollection of past events as traumas can both constrain and widen the political possibilities of a present. This article builds on such research by suggesting that the management of contemporary financial crises is reliant on a ritual work of repetition, wherein prior ‘crisis’ episodes are called upon to identify and authorise specific sites and modes of crisis management. In order to develop this argument, I focus on how past crises figure within the public pronouncements of four key policymaking organisations during the financial instability of 2007-2009. I find that while the Great Depression does enable these organisations to reaffirm old ways of managing crises, both it and the more recent Asian crisis are also made to disclose new truths about the evolution of multilateralism as a form of governance. In so doing, I argue, these historical narratives reveal how the management of global financial crisis depends upon a kind of ‘magic trick’. Rather than a strictly rational, historical process of problem solving, contemporary crises are instead negotiated through a contingent and self-referential conjuring of crisis-histories

Situating Arab women’s writing in a feminist ‘global gothic’ : madness, mothers and ghosts

This article sketches a new way of approaching some contemporary Levantine (Egyptian and Lebanese) feminist texts. Extending Glennis Byron’s notion of the ‘global gothic’, I examine Hanan Al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra (1986), Mansoura Ez Eldin’s Maryam’s Maze (2007) and Joumana Haddad’s The Seamstress’ Daughter (2019) as examples of an Arab feminist Gothic approach, which serves as a framework to theorise difficult and pressing questions that feminism poses regarding women’s rights. Arab feminist Gothic writers use the jahiliyyah period, or the ‘time of ignorance’, as a folkloric referential backdrop for texts which theorise the female condition under contemporary patriarchal society. The presence of ghosts, madness, doubles in the form of the folkloric qarina spirit-doubles and dreams can be read as part of a local Gothic feminist mode. This as-yet unacknowledged Arab feminist Gothic tradition, while emerging from debates over statehood and postcolonial subjectivities, delves into the intensity of personal traumas through the lens of women’s relationships to other women, especially mothers and daughters. Taking Arab feminist fiction as its focus, this article models how feminist scholarship can use genre, particularly the Gothic, to trace artistic feminist theorising in non-western contexts

The 1930s as black mirror: Visions of historical repetition in the global financial press, 2007-2009

Media coverage of the recent financial crisis has referred extensively to various past crises, and in particular to the events of the 1930s. This article suggests that the idea of the Great Depression has effectively come to function as a kind of historical ‘black mirror’ – a quasi-object within which conjuncture and historical representation interact to produce an image of capitalist history itself. Focusing on the journalistic output of four key financial publications, I trace how portrayals of the 1930s have evolved over the course of the crisis. I find that while the 1930s are frequently and consistently invoked in ways that purport to reveal the historicity of the crisis, these representations produce an oscillation between different visions of historical repetition, which in turn underpin competing interpretations of the crisis as it unfolds. In so doing, I argue, appeals to the 1930s have simultaneously served to conceal and disclose the constitutive relation of historical imagination to historical process – a double move that has had the paradoxical effect of both securing and undermining the reproduction of finance capitalism as we have come to know it