This report identifies impersonal efficiency as a driver of market automation during the past four decades, and speculates about the future problems it might pose. The ideology of impersonal efficiency is rooted in a mistrust of financial intermediaries such as floor brokers and specialists....

In 1999, Carruthers and Stinchcombe provided the classic discussion of ‘the social structure of liquidity’: the institutional arrangements that support markets in which ‘exchange occurs easily and frequently’. Our argument in this paper is that the material aspects of these arrangements...