ABSTRACT
This chapter has three main sections. The first reconstructs some problematiques and dimensions of 'cultural finance' by discussing the recent London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) scandal to inform my later discussion of conceptual questions related to culture in the second section. It proposes that prices rather than risk allow us to describe financial contingency. The third section indicates further avenues that the cultural political economy approach could pursue: the management of contingency through authority and the reconstruction of constitutive boundaries in the context of regulation and critique. Contingency is a social product of this mutual observing, thinking, evaluating, acting, and knowing. The LIBOR scandal reflects the transformative dynamics of banking in the last 20 years: it touches upon the end of Glass-Steagall and the separation of investment from credit units within a bank; the kind of regulation set in place, the financialization of Western economies, and the ties between traders, brokers, and regulators in specific ways.
