Fictional Commodities in Asset Bubbles – Was Polanyi Right All Along?

This paper seeks to understand what is to be regulated in market failure. Where the paper benefits but diverges from Polanyi’s analysis is to explore the global self-regulatory markets of today and to suggest that his differentiation of fictitious from socially-sustained (embedded) market relationships holds a key to why both regulation of contemporary political economy is failing, and why fictitious markets in fictitious relationships may be beyond regulation. Is there any analytical value in disentangling fictitious from embedded markets and rationalizing our regulatory resources on the latter while exposing the risks to healthy social relationships in proliferating the former? In this inquiry we are not so much interested in why bubbles burst, but why bubbles at all?