Future Finance

This chapter engages with future finance from a perspective of financial production and practices, which link social systems across scale. Finance has undergone several transformational shifts, thereby deeply affecting these links with other social systems that define their functioning, their organisation and governance. Importantly, future finance stands at multiple crossroads, confronted with a range of vast, far-reaching challenges, including geopolitical shifts, technology induced changes, and strong sustainability imperatives. Not least, all this begs the question to what degree finance as an increasingly self-serving industry can be redesigned to the benefit of the wider public by creating public wealth more broadly. This chapter sets some overall parameters, including changing law and legal practice as pivotal, yet largely neglected, ordering and governance mechanisms, and it provides cursory evidence for their importance. It thereby suggests new directions for geographical research in the framework of a practice-oriented, forensic-like research programme that links the societally and economically transformative processes of financialization with altered production modes of finance, thereby stressing the importance of both law and legal practice, and geography.