The paper develops a sympathetic critique of the concept of financialization. This concept has been developed to account for the empowering of financial markets and their influence over the unfolding of economy, polity and society. Processes of financialization are claimed to manifest at a number of scales, ranging from higher levels of instability within the economy as a whole, through pressure exerted on corporations by capital markets, to the equity effects of the financial system on individuals and households.. In seeking to explain the change within contemporary society financialization has to date been relatively underplayed, particularly when compared to similar and related concepts such as neoliberalization. While the concept of financialization has the potential to unite researchers across cognate social science fields, thereby building critical mass and recognition within social studies of money and finance, we argue that to date research has been insufficiently attentive to the role of space and place, both in terms of its processes and its effects. The paper explores a number of possibly fruitful directions for work on financialization to pursue, focusing in particular on the concepts of the financial ecology and financial citizenship.

This paper is concerned with the changing nature of space. More and more of the spaces of everyday life come loaded up with software, lines of code that are installing a new kind of automatically reproduced background and whose nature is only now starting to become clear. This paper is an attempt to map out this background. The paper begins by considering the nature of software. Subsequently, a simple audit is undertaken of where software is chiefly to be found in the spaces of everyday life. The next part of the paper notes the way in which more and more of this software is written to mimic corporeal intelligence, so as to produce a better and more unobtrusive fit with habitation. The paper then sets out three different geographies of software and the way in which they are implicated in the reproduction of everyday life before concluding with a consideration of the degree to which we might consider the rise of software as an epochal event or something much more modest.

The paper argues that the origins of the financial crisis of 2007-2008 can ultimately be located in four spaces: in international financial centres, in particular, in the longstanding competition that has existed between London and New York; in the insularity of the everyday geographies of money that have emerged in such centres in the wake of the apparent hegemony of financialization; in the geographical recycling of surpluses and deficits and more particularly the structural dependency that has grown up between China and the United States, and; finally, in the growing power of the financial media, centred in international financial centres and an increasingly significant agent in performing money and the economy in general, and in engendering mimetic forms of rationality.

Financial exclusion refers to those processes by which individuals and households face difficulties in accessing financial services. Economic geography was an important catalyst in developing research into processes of financial exclusion in the 1990s, focusing initially on the geographies of physical access. This research was motivated by a concern with the equity effects of financial systems, and identifying a general process of branch closure across industrial economies. The paper contains an analysis of the changing geographies of bank and building society closure in Britain between 1995 and 2003 and reveals that closures continue to be disproportionately concentrated within poorer areas, yet the geography of financial infrastructure has been written out of UK financial exclusion policy. The paper concludes by arguing that policy needs to take greater account of the uneven geography of retail financial services production and consumption.

The last two decades have witnessed, as part of a wider financialisation of British economy and society, a creeping privatisation of social welfare provision. Political justification for the expansion of privatised social insurance markets has frequently been couched in the language of responsibility. However, as the ‘credit crunch’ spectacularly attests and as studies of the dynamics of financialisation have succeeded in showing, financialised capitalism turns on excess. In this paper we explore some of the ways in which the reworking of long-term insurance or life assurance has contributed to the financialisation of everyday life. More particularly, we trace the emergence of what we call ‘lifestyle insurance’. Our purpose here is not only to begin to map the terrain and consider the consequences of this nascent modality of insurance in the UK, but in so doing to contribute to wider debates about the processes of subjectification that underwrite financialisation. In addition to pressing for a greater attention to be given to life assurance the paper suggests, by mobilising the figure of excess, three more areas to which studies of the financialisation of the everyday might productively attend: first, the financialisation of life itself; second, the ways in which financialisation is affectively charged; third, the spatial politics of financialisation.