I think a lot about how we tell ourselves stories about finance. When we pinpoint a crime, a loophole, or otherwise imagine an ending, we feel the relief of moral clarity. But the continuous action of finance rolls on, with all of its damage.

Frantzen locates a lack of resolution as a formal quality of finance, and discusses financial thrillers, which often resolve, as “co-constitutive of the process of financialisation and the financial print culture.”

As print culture of all types fades, I still think it matters to distinguish among genres. They structure audience expectations, and audience expectations of the financial world matter to our democracy.

Really, in order to understand finance, you have to understand the '70s — a decade which, as Melinda Cooper writes, "was a fight to the death between labor and capital.”

I started out by thinking about enormous amount of nonfiction cultural production around the unresolved story of Jeffrey Epstein.

Frantzen cites Oliver Bullough's books as contemporary examples of the thriller, and I argue here that while those books can be thrilling, they’re not thrillers. They don’t explore the heroism or villainy of financiers, they don’t resolve, and they don’t provide moral clarity or relief. Nor do they, as the Epstein matter does, feed conspiracy theories.
All The President's Men, on the other hand, was in fact written as a thriller of the ‘70s, which resolved in its print form after the money trail ended, but not with political closure. (I also talk about Bob Woodward here.)

This response to Mikkel Krause Frantzen’s book came out in September 2026 in Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory.