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Money, finance, and capitalism provide fertile ground for those inspired by psychoanalytic and socioanalytic perspectives. The 2008 financial crisis—when global financial markets came within a hair's breadth of collapse—is perhaps the most obvious example of the kind of highly irrational functioning that is of deep concern and interest for those using these frameworks. Well before 2008, however, as early as the 1637 Dutch tulip bubble—and including the 1929-1933 financial crisis, the collapses of Barings Bank, WorldCom, and Enron, as well as the 1998 LTCM (Long-Term Capital Management) crisis—there has been evidence of much irrational functioning in the area of finance. Whatever the efforts of governments and regulatory authorities around the world to stem these problems, it seems that not much has changed. Indeed, since 2008, we have had catastrophic “rogue trader” losses at a number of major banks; the Libor scandal; the UK's PPI (payment protection insurance) fiasco; and an international money laundering debacle, resulting in fines of hundreds of millions of dollars being paid by some of the world's largest and most prestigious financial institutions. Perhaps most serious of all, since 2009 we have had an on-going eurozone crisis that threatens the global financial system and would appear to have little chance of abating.
It is for these reasons that this is a welcome and timely volume, one that focuses on a wide sweep of issues in this field, and includes a range of fascinating contributions. The book is framed by a profound sense of the failure of the economic models that have guided economy and society over many decades, and by a view that socio-analysis and psychoanalysis may well have something important to say to fill this void.
In a volume spanning a total of twenty-six chapters, it is only possible to comment on those that I found especially interesting. The foundation of the book is provided by a thought-provoking and useful introduction by the editors, Bu