Trading Truth - by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

How financial markets fuel conspiracy culture and our crisis of truth--and why rethinking finance is democracy's most urgent need.

"An important book showing that 'post-truth politics' cannot be understood without studying the broader socioeconomic transformation of our times, especially the rise of finance. A must-read." -Thomas Piketty

Current debates treat disinformation as if it were a cultural failure, suggesting that our remedies should focus on restoring expertise, fact checking, or media literacy. But what if we are missing the crux of the issue? In Trading Truth, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou argues that we are--that, in fact, distortion is not a glitch of political reality but a systemic feature of finance capitalism. Far from merely corrupting truth, financial markets--from machine-learning trading and cryptocurrencies to ETFs and prediction markets--reshape what counts as real and what gets dismissed as fake.

This book traces this distortion and its role in the making of a new kind of financial populism, one that binds Trump's MAGA movement and tech lords to finance's rising titans: asset managers and quant traders. This alliance--political as much as epistemic--takes shape around warped valuations, spurious correlations, and the systematic leveraging of volatility. And yet it draws in vast publics, offering a form of belonging and participation that mainstream politics has failed to provide.

The author shows how today's conspiratorial culture is inseparable from the operations of finance in ways not recognized before. More than disinformation, fraud, or manipulation, distortion becomes a means of managing the vast complexity of our time, and even of finding community within it. The book offers readers a way forward: a theory of truth that meets finance head on and reimagines how it could be turned toward shared prosperity.

About the Author

Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou is Professor of Economy and Society at University College London, where he is Founder and Director of the UCL Centre for Capitalism Studies. His first book Speculative Communities was published in 2022 to international acclaim. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, El País, London Review of Books Podcast, and venues such as the Locarno Film Festival and the Deichtorhallen Gallery. He has written for The Guardian, Die Zeit, Aeon, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications.