Is finance really about speculation? This is a good question with which to join the absorbing discussions on crisis, capital and value that abound in scholarly production today. It faces straightforwardly the paradoxes that the critique of finance encounters when it is put to the test of explicating what the problem with a financial appraisal of value exactly is. In some discourses, especially of the critical kind, finance and speculation are two words that refer to the same thing, that is, to a logic of valuation that relies solely on the anticipation of prices, claims on fictitious value that serve lucrative purposes with no direct concern for the real economy or for the real value of things. In others, for sure in the terminology of corporate finance and financial analysis proper, finance is the name of the set of techniques that allow an estimation of the underlying, fundamental value of things, precisely against their so-called market, speculative value, so as to guide sound investment and secure value creation. What both kinds of approaches share to quite a degree, we see, is some sort of a fundamentalist theory of true value, one that can tell the overvalued from the undervalued, the rational from the irrational, the fundamental from the speculative. Both orient critique accordingly against the speculative game, leaving the core of the political technology of finance untouched: namely, the idea that it is necessary to ground investment in a proper account of value creation potentials for tomorrow, not on the whims of the market today.

Martijn Konings does a brilliant job in exposing such paradoxes and in exploring a way forward out of them.^{Footnote 1} Written in the form of a short though perceptive intellectual commentary on a series of contemporary and classical works, Capital and Time indeed begins with a warning about the impasses a fundamentalist theory of value opens for the critique of finance. He endeavors in that respect to solve the quandaries that constructivist approaches to the performativity of finance had left open—a task, it must be said, that had been previously dealt with elsewhere.^{Footnote 2} His recipe for a solution includes, most centrally, a rereading of Niklas Luhmann. Why Luhmann? This is a good lead, obviously, which has been followed by others in the job of locating in the anticipatory, promissory technologies of finance the whirls, blind spots and loopholes that form the representational reality of financial capitalism.^{Footnote 3} Konings specifically sees in Luhmann a tool with which to make sense of the process of self-reference, if not self-genesis, that the signification of money entails in capitalist modernity. He also finds there a quite effective device with which to approach the orientation that finance reportedly favors the most: that is, an orientation towards the future, an orientation that carries, as a most recognizable trademark, the inevitable rhetoric of expectation, anticipation, uncertainty and risk.

It is peculiar in that respect that a book with such a bold title does not delve into the way in which time is dealt with within the dialect of capital. Apart from a few remarks on the nature and importance of double-entry bookkeeping and on the centrality of the idea of leverage in financial operation, Capital and Time does not engage frontally with financial accounting and financial analysis proper. This is a pity, since an examination of notions such as the time value of money, the cost of capital, net present value and discounted cash flows is certainly a requirement for a political interpretation of how particular notions of time organize the ways in which things are managed financially.^{Footnote 4} Entire parcels of technological life are indeed controlled by these particular forms of capitalistic valuation, and by the notions of future value that go with them.^{Footnote 5} Looking at them from an anthropological angle makes it possible to disarticulate the semiotics of the specific modes of temporality that they express.^{Footnote 6} This can in turn further the development of the perception according to which time—meaning in fact the investor’s time—is indeed part and parcel of the very setup of financial imagination.^{Footnote 7} The philosophical hypothesis of time being a product of capital rather than the other way around can then be radically deployed.^{Footnote 8}

Instead, Konings locates the action elsewhere. The parts of Capital and Time that deal with the nitty-gritty of financial affairs are actually about central banking and monetary policy. This move is very much welcome. Attention to where money comes from, to what it means and to how it behaves is indeed often missing from current contributions to the sociology of finance.^{Footnote 9} Konings had already suggested a focus on this in previous work, calling for an emancipation from dogmas of embeddedness and disembeddedness.^{Footnote 10} Examining the concepts and policies that inform the banking system today, with their distinctive construction of the problem of liquidity and instability, turns into an essential task.^{Footnote 11} The crux of the argument in Capital and Time turns on the question of the neutrality of money, and the bulk of the discussion is concerned with how neoliberal or not the doctrines pursued at the Federal Reserve System in the United States of America are. A great deal of the focus is, for example, on how the measures implemented under Paul Volcker’s mandate could be read as an astute play on the expectations a self-organizing economic mechanism is meant to be based on, and on how these evolved afterwards. Here, Konings offers penetrating intellectual interpretations that go, for example, through a comparison between the views of Hyman Minsky and those of Friedrich Hayek on monetary policy and financial rationality. A neoliberal doctrine of the production of credit money, Konings claims, is one that implicitly recognizes, and promotes, the self-referential, non-fundamentalist nature of finance, eventually leading to that form of financial order that we call crisis.

With self-reference as a prime theoretical leitmotif, and with an open acknowledgment of the pregnancy of the views that fall under the rubric of neoliberalism, Capital and Time runs the risk of putting its distinctive conceptual bête noire, namely speculation, back again under the spotlight. This risk is willingly assumed by Konings who, far from directing attention away from that concept, still situates it at the heart of his intellectual edifice. A U-turn, then? Not quite, as Capital and Time swiftly keeps the reader in a state of vigilance against the political frailty of that notion. Political nerve is indeed sometimes vivid in the pages of Capital and Time. There is no candid sympathy for the accomplishments of the financial industry, but no candid sympathy for hasty social critique either. In matters of critical attitude towards neoliberalism, Konings inflexibly rejects, for example, Giorgio Agamben’s take on the sovereign decision, failing perhaps to confront the extent to which the vernacular doctrine of a permanent state of decision under conditions of uncertainty can be thought of as being part of a decisionist legacy.^{Footnote 12} A fruitful dialogue is certainly possible, though, with other perspectives that see in the, alas, inescapable idiom of speculation a timely instrument for political manoeuver.^{Footnote 13}