Assets and infrastructures

Assets are central for the functioning of financial markets but have, to date, seen only little attention from scholars of financial infrastructures. This chapter seeks to address this shortcoming and argues that assets are important mediators between financial activity and financial infrastructures. To this end, this chapter draws on the notion of ‘boundary objects’ from science and technology studies to analyze the manifold interactions enabled by the asset form. To investigate the links between assets and financial infrastructures in more detail, this chapter distinguishes three stages in the lifecycle of assets. During assetization, emergent assets mediate between various professions as well as calculative infrastructures that enable their capitalization. During the second stage, asset management, assets mediate between various financial infrastructures and two crucial financial operations: trading, which introduces volatile asset prices, and layering, i.e. the production of new assets from existing assets. The third stage, deassetization, refers to the planned or unplanned dissolution or devaluation of assets and has so far received only little scholarly attention. Mapping and systematizing the manifold interconnections between assets and infrastructures that span across sociology, political economy and economic geography, this chapter also nurtures much-needed cross-disciplinary dialogue.