Horacio Ortiz provides a critical analysis of the social institutions and practices that produce and regulate stock pricing and valuation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among financial professionals in New York and Paris, this book shows how the political imaginaries that underpin financial markets legitimize global inequalities. This book displays Ortiz's distinctive combination of hugely skilled fieldwork and theoretical sophistication. Here, for the first time, the insights of this subtle thinker are laid out in full for Anglophone readers. Ortiz's politically inflected anthropology of finance throws vital new light on everyday practices that profoundly shape today's world.