Balance Sheet Aesthetics and the Racial Contours of Cost
On Investment Imaginaries and Inequality
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2230534 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kimberly Chong (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 66 |
| Issue | S27 |
| Pages | S25-S34 |
| Publication date | 2025-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Current Anthropology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0011-3204 • E-ISSN: 1537-5382 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/734299 |
| OpenAlex | W4411482655 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 41 |
Building on research into capitalist futures and economic imagination, this article looks at the balance sheet, which is a financial statement that publicly listed companies must produce each year and is crucial to the labor of speculation. Paid to invest on behalf of institutional investors, fund managers use the balance sheet to help them speculate on future opportunities for gain; it is a tool that has imaginative effects and projects ethical orders. Typically, they look for companies with “strong balance sheets” when constructing their investment portfolios. Although narrated in technical terms, I argue that identifying a strong balance sheet engenders subjective acts of interpretation and value judgments about how cost and revenue are produced, in what manner, and by whom. There exists a “balance sheet aesthetics”—ideas of what makes a balance sheet desirable and gives it persuasive force—that is materialized through the differential valuation of race and nation. Thus, categories that are typically presented as purely economic, such as “cost,” act as racial signifiers within financialized production. In this way, China, even if it is the world’s second-largest economy, is still an “emerging market” and a “natural” place to find cost savings within Euro-American investment imaginaries.
Aesthetics · Art · Balance (ability · Balance sheet · Business · Finance · History · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Political Economy and Marxism · Psychology
Hedged Out
More Heat than Light
Navigating Austerity
Financialization and the World Economy
Asset Manager Capitalism as a Corporate Governance Regime
The entangled legacies of empire
Discounting the future
Bonded Life
The Licit Life of Capitalism
Political Imaginaries of the Weighted Average Cost of Capital
Accounting for Profit and the History of Capital
Steering capital
Extractive investibility in historical colonial perspective
Finance/security infrastructures
The color of money at the financial frontier
Supply Chains and the Human Condition
Innovative Business Models and Varieties of Capitalism
Appropriately Indian
Imagined Futures
From performativity to political economy
Narrative Authority
The Visual and Material Dimensions of Legitimacy
Making sense of financialization
Constructing conviction through action and narrative
Spiderweb Capitalism
A History of the Modern Fact
Good People and Dirty Work
Financial value
A political anthropology of finance
The back office goes global
Accounting for Rationality
Dreaming with BRICs
Active fund managers and the rise of passive investing
Speculation
Technologies of the Imagination
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 3 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |