Moral and pragmatist sociology has studied capitalism as a set of institutions that require justification, which has historically been offered through forms of rewarding and meaningful work, anchoring the human life course in a narrative of individual and collective progress. However, emerging with neoliberalism, then becoming explicit after 2008, contemporary capitalism has become organised around the logic of assets and wealth as opposed to labour and production. This provokes a vacuum of justification. Once all actors are (as Minsky argued) balance sheet actors and profit becomes a function of sheer temporality, the economy ceases to function as a moral order and instead becomes imbued with existential concerns of temporality, durability, survival, and finitude. Possessed only of certain contingently acquired assets and liabilities, the self becomes wholly contingent in the sense described by Heidegger; that is, as ‘thrown’ into having had a past and into a relationship of ‘care’ towards the future. The article identifies symptoms of this existential condition in empirical studies of wealth elites, for whom (in the absence of conventional liberal and production-based measures of worth) problems of meaning, purpose, and finitude are endemic.

Brett Christophers’ Our Lives in Their Portfolios documents the rising dominance of asset managers in tangible assets that matter to society, such as housing and infrastructure. He rightly describes the social harm of asset managers who focus on short-term wealth extraction from assets that require long-term investment. Where Christophers focuses less is on another structural question raised: why are the financial assets of working people in public and union pension funds managed by these extractive asset managers in the first place? How do we take our lives out of their portfolios?

In this essay, I argue that Christophers’ description of asset-manager society is best characterized by a logic of ‘acquire and extract’. I build on his insights to delve into the less-explored world of emancipatory alternatives. I argue for radical transformations – what I term ‘democratic ruptures’ – that shift the investment logic of asset managers toward one of ‘build and nourish’. With insights from the failure to establish economic democracy over large pools of finance by unions in the postwar period, I argue that the crucial missing ingredient in the social and ecological disaster of asset-manager society today is democracy. I conclude with a radical reimagining of financial democracy for the twenty-first century.

The role of housing in providing a welfare asset has been widely explored. With the growth in home ownership between 1979 and 2008 and erosion of the welfare state, housing wealth has become part of the welfare mix in the UK. Here, we present analysis of housing outcomes, as measured in the UK Household Longitudinal Survey (UKHLS), among people who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual in Great Britain. This shows that lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people have poorer housing outcomes than heterosexual counterparts: they are less likely to be homeowners; more likely to be private renters; and more likely to be social renters. With growing intergenerational inequalities in access to home ownership, we argue that, as openly LGB (and broader trans and queer) people being on average younger than the rest of the population, this could lead to LGB people, as a group, being excluded from asset-based welfare in the future as they age.

Finance and financialization have dominated scholarship on capitalism and society for the past decade. Although scholars noted early on that the expansion of finance relies on the creation (and trade) of new financial assets, assets and assetization have been a blind spot as scholarship continued to focus on financial markets (Langley, 2020). This, however, is currently about to change as a number of landmark publications have been published in the past months that point toward growing momentum in the field of asset and assetization research. In this short essay, I review Kean Birch and Fabian Muniesa's edited collection, Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism, which is of central importance to said momentum, and put it into dialogue with some of the other recent publications on this topic.

Conventional monotheist religious believers commonly believe that God will sometimes assist them, will be on their side. God, in other words, they believe, is an asset. Conceptually an asset is anything (such as a person or an object) that can assist one, something that is prima facie good to possess or to have on one's side, that is likely to or can assist one to make one's life go better, overall. Having assets can have weighty implications, including moral ones. I argue that here the implications are quite surprising, and indeed paradoxical. In particular, the religious will have in certain circumstances good reasons, and sometimes even moral obligations, to give up their interests for those who lack such assets, namely secular non-believers. The claim is not that religious people actually see things in this way but that, normatively, given their beliefs, many of them should, in the sense of the subjective ‘ought’. This can be relevant both in this world and concerning the next. Moreover, in many situations plausible religious replies are not sufficient to block the move. This topic has not, to the best of my knowledge, ever been seriously analysed philosophically.

This study uses three wealth modules from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey to explore the gender wealth gap for single Australian households between 2002 and 2010. The findings indicate a significant gender wealth gap, which has increased over the 8 years explored. Most of the increase in the wealth gap was associated with a relatively rapid increase in the value of housing assets by single men over the study period. The findings of this study challenge a wider literature that tends to emphasise that men are more prepared to invest in ‘risky’ assets such as shares and that their higher wealth is due to these investment strategies. Instead, this study emphasises how, in the Australian context at least, it was higher growth rates in the value of housing assets owned by single men that improved their wealth position relative to single women over the last decade.

When designing programs to assist the poor, it is important to recognize who is most in need of government assistance. Although measures of poverty are often based on income alone, poverty measures based on both income and assets provide greater precision in the analysis of this group since accumulated assets can be liquidated to compensate for temporary shortfalls in income. The current study used the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (2007–2017) to analyze associations between different facets of poverty dynamics (i.e. poverty entry and exit) and its determinants. We explored differences in results based on whether poverty was measured by income alone, or income plus assets. The Cox proportional hazard regression was used to examine how demographic characteristics predicted poverty entry and poverty exit. Results indicated factors predicting poverty entry were not identical to those predicting difficulty of exiting poverty. Also, the risk of poverty entry and exit differed based on whether poverty was measured by income alone, or income plus assets. Thus, using income plus assets provides new perspectives into poverty dynamics which past research, based on income alone, did not provide. These new insights can be used to inform decisions about policies for poverty prevention and alleviation.

The International Criminal Court is empowered by its constituent instrument to request its states parties to identify, trace, freeze, and seize assets ‘after a warrant of arrest or a summons has been issued … having due regard to the strength of the evidence and the rights of the parties concerned’. This article critically examines the approach adopted by the Court to requesting such protective measures at the pre-trial phase, reflecting on how the rights and interests of the primary stakeholders implicated by this process: (i) accused persons, (ii) the Prosecutor, (iii) victims, and (iv) bona fide third parties, are safeguarded and balanced.

Applicable statutes give Nigerian courts discretion to achieve fairness in marital property readjustment. Ironically, the courts’ approach has often been to adjudicate on the basis of formal title, resulting in a general failure to make any readjustments. This article offers two alternative explanations for this judicial behaviour: absence of a specific statutory marriage-centred definition of matrimonial property; and the courts’ failure to appreciate the implicit matrimonial property regime revealed by a perspicacious interpretation of the statutes. These factors lead the courts to exercise a title-finding jurisdiction instead of an adjustive one. This conservative approach results in the courts exercising an exclusionary prescription of property. These flaws ignore the socio-cultural underpinnings and environment of marriage that support patriarchy in Africa and generally “disable” women in relation to property rights. Sample court cases support this thesis and underscore the need for a statutory definition of matrimonial property, with marriage as its denominator.

In this article Bernard Ince analyzes the characteristics and causes of personal insolvency and bankruptcy among professional theatrical artistes in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, 1830 to 1913, within England and Wales. This offers an illuminating development of the author's previous studies of the impact of bankruptcy laws on the Victorian theatre and the pattern of failures in theatre management over this period. It identifies key points of convergence and divergence between the trends in failure of managers and artistes, considering reasons for these variations and for the number of failures overall. It concludes that prominent among the many causes of insolvency in artistes were touring company failures and irregularity of employment, which goes some way to explain why a higher percentage of artistes than managers were engaged in at least one occupation unrelated to theatre work. The article also provides a necessary methodological foundation for future study of an area that has often been overlooked. Bernard Ince is an independent theatre historian who has contributed earlier studies of tne Victorian and Edwardian theatre to New Theatre Quarterly.

Bernard Ince here surveys insolvency and bankruptcy in the theatres of England and Wales during the period 1830 to 1913. His methodology analyzes failures in absolute and relative terms, using aggregate and disaggregated data. The annual pattern of failure shows a marked volatility in the aggregate, with the absolute number of failures tending to increase towards the 1880s before declining thereafter. When the data are expressed as a rate relative to annual theatre population change, the trend is, however, reversed, failures being much higher in the 1830s and 40s than in the later decades. When annual failures are analyzed alternatively in terms of the number of theatres actually managed or owned by bankrupts, and the data disaggregated between the London and provincial theatres, different patterns of failure emerge, London theatres experiencing higher risk during those early decades, while the provincial Theatres Royal on the other hand are especially vulnerable during the 1830s, 40s, and 50s, and other theatres in the provinces are exposed more during the 1860s. From an analysis of over 200 cases it is clear that factors contributing to theatrical failure are diverse and often complex. Rarely is failure the result of a single catastrophic event but is more often caused by a combination of events, or from the cumulative impact of insolvencies carried over from previous years. While a correlation between annual fluctuations in theatrical failures and cycles in the general economy cannot be firmly established, anecdotal evidence suggests that regional or local conditions play a more important role. It is concluded that while the financial situation of many theatres operated on the limits of financial viability, bankruptcy on a significant scale was uncommon, indicative of remarkable resilience in the face of profound economic, social, political, and legislative change. The author is an independent theatre historian.

This study is a subjective synthesis of the work of many academics, supervisors and practitioners on the topic of liquidity and many of its multiple aspects. It borrows heavily and freely from those works in the pursuit of coherence, as this subject can be both confused and confusing. Although many hypotheses, both established and speculative, are referred to, none is proposed in this paper. In order to be of possible use to a range of readers, it roams from the most basic and elementary to some of the most recent and advanced. In pursuit of brevity and readability, in many instances it can do little more than introduce a particular feature and leave further investigation to the reader. Liquidity is clearly a topic with much unfinished business. Our ambition in writing this paper is threefold: first, to raise awareness amongst actuaries of the wide-ranging implications for actuarial work of liquidity; second, to bring some coherence to the manifold measures and uses of the concept of liquidity by attempting to synthesise some of the key elements of knowledge today; finally, to highlight some of the more high profile and open questions relevant for actuarial work. This paper makes many references to behaviour during the crisis and its aftermath; however, it is not intended to be a forensic analysis of the crisis attributing causality. The crisis has simply served as an experiment during which many things became observable.