The present moment is defined by escalating crises that have begun to overwhelm even the systems designed to contain them. Geopolitical instability reverberates through financial markets, while the resurgence of authoritarian politics (what we might call “Trumpism 2.0”) brings with it a wholesale abandonment of green finance commitments and the unravelling of sustainability accords across the banking industry. Democratic institutions are under strain, and a politics of chaos and weaponized instability has taken hold—one that increasingly unnerves even the markets themselves.
What happens when financial systems designed to manage risk and ensure stability accelerate such systemic breakdown? This essay introduces “collapse finance” as a framework for understanding how finance increasingly governs through crisis. The concept seeks to capture a shift in which institutions built to secure the future—from insurance regimes to pensions, and from government bonds to public benefit systems—appear to be contributing to its destabilization, even as they offer new avenues for profit amid growing uncertainty. At first glance, the dynamics we describe might seem familiar: finance profiting from crisis, capital flowing into instruments that appear to manage destruction while quietly benefiting from it. But what we are tracking here signals a deeper transformation. The categories that once gave structure to financial crisis response—risk, security, recovery, even “the market” itself—are becoming increasingly unstable. The analytical scaffolding that once made crises exploitable is no longer holding. Risk appears less calculable, volatility more continuous, and the distinction between breakdown and opportunity more difficult to sustain.
This reconfiguration is not only structural or institutional, but also epistemological. Collapse finance operates as a mechanism for producing and managing competing narratives of the future, leaving that tension in place, redistributing it, and monetizing the uncertainty it generates. Collapse finance thrives on such multidirectional speculation: it accommodates contradictory trajectories—stability and crisis, growth and extinction—without requiring coherence or closure. At the sharper edge of this ecosystem, cryptocurrencies are seen simultaneously as dangerous bubbles and as hedges against systemic collapse. Catastrophe bonds offer high returns even as the events they insure become more frequent and less predictable. Pensions are reframed as individualized investment vehicles whose security depends on one’s capacity to manage risk in increasingly volatile markets. And all the while a new class of founder-entrepreneurs heralds prosperous long futures for some just as it further upends social security for most.
The implications of this layered ambiguity extend beyond financial systems, shaping the subjects who navigate them. Finance’s promise is: the world may be falling apart, but your portfolio might still perform. In this contradictory terrain, we encounter the figure of Homo speculans. No longer the rational actor of classical economics nor the disciplined neoliberal investor, Homo speculans is suspended between opposing imperatives: to act in the face of collapse and to speculate on its unfolding. Caught between denial and hypervigilance, fantasy and anticipation, this subject embodies the lived contradictions of a financial system that thrives on systemic instability.
The essays in this four-part series track how collapse finance is unfolding across a range of institutional and social terrains to map a set of interlocking dynamics: the failure of risk models, the speculative reinvention of once-stable institutions, and the emerging subjectivities that form in their wake. We begin with the emergent field of longevity finance, where aging populations are reframed as investment frontiers. Giulia Dal Maso introduces the concept of “longevity capitalism”—a biopolitical and financial regime in which capital subsumes the temporality of life itself. As collective welfare infrastructure collapses, she argues, life expectancy becomes a new frontier of accumulation, from financialized pension systems and “age-tech” ventures to tech oligarchs bankrolling biological immortality. Melinda Cooper follows with an analysis of founder-based capitalism, where mercurial figures like Peter Thiel and Donald Trump offer an inverted, radicalized vision of Schumpeter’s creative destruction, weaponizing neoliberalism’s antisocial proclivities to establish new feudal dynasties. These founder-personalities do not simply lead firms; they anchor entire speculative ecosystems. Their volatility is inseparable from the inflated value they generate, and from the political collapse they both anticipate and accelerate. Finally, psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster concludes with a reflection on the psychic life of collapse. Drawing from contemporary psychoanalytic debates, she asks how the old psychic categories—neurosis, psychosis, melancholia, etc.—are holding up under present conditions. What does it mean to put this system on the couch? Can psychoanalysis help us understand, and interrupt, the emotional grammar of collapse?
Together, these contributions show that collapse finance pushes beyond descriptive accounts of how financial instruments respond to crisis. It marks a broader shift in how risk and uncertainty are conceptualized, how futures are constructed, and how political possibilities are foreclosed. Collapse finance disorients subjects, redistributes vulnerabilities, and reshapes the conditions of survival. As volatility becomes the norm, as security turns speculative, and as finance both rides and rewires that instability, the question follows: What forms of politics remain when collapse itself is just another asset class?
