E-Books →The Everyday Practice of Valuation and Investment Political Imaginaries of Shareholder Value

Horacio Ortiz provides a critical analysis of the social institutions and practices that produce and regulate stock pricing and valuation. He examines how financial professionals evaluate and invest in listed companies, unraveling the contradictory definitions of financial value that shape their behavior. Ortiz demonstrates how ideologically laden notions of investing skill and efficient markets are central to the everyday practices of financial valuation, as well as how they function to justify the broader system. He scrutinizes the technical aspects of valuation and investment, their place in social relations within and among companies, and their relation to state regulation in order to demystify how the financial industry presents prices as truths that the rest of society must accept.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among stock brokers and investment management companies in New York and Paris, this book shows how the political imaginaries that underpin financial markets are central to producing, sustaining, and legitimizing global inequalities.