Money and the Signs of the Times: Religion and Temporality in the History of Financialization

Two common sayings about money: “Time is money,” and “Money makes the world go round.” When taking a closer look, these phrases conceal odd logics. What does it mean to suggest that time is equivalent to money? That money generates the world’s movement? What theories of temporality and historical movement allow us to see time, money, and causality in these ways? I argue that the history of financial capital shows how theological and critical articulations of history were both influenced by and determinative of economic logics that lead to financialization. Far from­­––as Agamben and others argue––beginning in 1971 with the U.S. rejection of the gold standard, I suggest that financialization has a longer history: one which is freighted with more than merely analogical relationships to religious logics, and which implicates the history of religion in relation to the Atlantic slave trade and the colonial enterprises which facilitated it.