Paranoid Finance

There is a link between finance and paranoia, and that link may well be inescapable. At the core of financial imagination lies a notion of value ¿ of `value creation¿ ¿ that is loaded with trouble. This is the trouble of a fragile metaphor: a metaphor of fecund money and future return, of true value and false value, of true value that should be protected from the perils of dilapidation, expropriation and speculation, but whose substance is in fact nowhere to be found. Contemporary conspiratorial, millennialist discourse on money, banking and wealth does not embody a delirious misrepresentation of the logic of finance: rather, it exacerbates the paranoid potentials inherent in mainstream financial imagination. This is the radical hypothesis developed in this book: that of paranoid finance as a sedimentation of the demons that haunt the conventional categories of financial value. Tutorials abound today that guarantee access to secret knowledge about the financial system, to magical curre