The proximate causes of the global financial crisis (GFC) have been widely attributed to ‘financialisation’. However, we argue that the global financial crisis had cultural conditions of possibility that were imbricated with economic factors in complex ways. The idea that the crisis was the...

In this article the author examines a number of ways in which the real world economy is currently merging with practices that have been classically understood as belonging to the spheres of culture and play. The article discusses several areas in which the conceptual line between the supposedly...

The development of submarine telegraph systems and telegraph news -- the global media of their time -- in the late-nineteenth century deserve study for many reasons, not least because they were front and centre in the global financial crisis of 1873 and fit the criteria used to define...

Drawing together insights from key figures in the collections industry and observation at one of the UK's largest debt purchasers, this paper opens up the socio-material mechanisms of ‘market attachment’ through which, drawing on Franck Cochoy, the potential ‘captation’ of the defaulting...

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...

Why has the financial crisis not led to more radical public contestation and political reforms? In investigating the muted response to the crisis so far, the paper highlights the significance of ideological fantasy for appreciating the interpenetration of economy and society. We interpret this...