Finance
Financial Capitalism Is More Dangerous Than Ever Today
Some writers have taken the period since the crisis of financial capitalism in 2008 to mark the “end of neoliberalism” or the advent of “post-neoliberalism.” Others have described it as a “mutant,” “zombie” iteration of a neoliberalism that is in effect “half-dead, half-alive.”
In an era of rising protectionism, right-wing ideology, and deglobalization, neoliberal ideologies have certainly experienced a backlash. But they have also rearticulated themselves by forging new alliances and taking on novel forms. Three dimensions of the current conjuncture are worth highlighting.
Today, as in the 1960s, there is an immense interest in the form that money takes as a central factor in politics and social life. Monetary policy is more than ever a political question of direct concern to people otherwise uninterested in its arcana. There is reason to think that the global system of money and finance is approaching a disruptive threshold of historic significance, with the potential to change how societies invest, insure, and trade.
Of course, the form of money — essentially the socially and politically constructed “promise to pay” — has always fluctuated. What is distinctive about the transformation of money in the early-twenty-first century is, first of all, the proliferation of digital currencies and tokens. Operating in the shadows of hegemonic monetary systems, these cannot simply be seen as tools for bottom-up emancipation pitted against authoritarian central banks and austerity-inducing monetary politics, as is sometimes claimed by their boosters.
Rather, non-fungible tokens, Web3, blockchain technology, crypto, and decentralized autonomous organizations are at the forefront of a financial revolution driven increasingly by transnational platforms and central banks themselves. In the name of flexibility and efficiency, they prefigure the end of physical cash, thereby jeopardizing privacy and further undermining democracy. Such developments signal the exhaustion of the quantitative easing (QE) regime since 2019.
Although they are far too complex to be analyzed in any detail here, they represent one prospectus for the so-called post-neoliberal order, whose features cannot be understood as progressive, promising in some instances to surrender still more authority to the lords of finance themselves, potentially directly by administrative means. The terms in which this new monetary architecture is discussed recall earlier debates. In the field of digital currencies, for example, the highly restricted, limited, and market-disciplining logic of Bitcoin bears comparison to the built-in scarcity of gold — and if introduced more broadly, could reproduce the logic of the gold standard — while the seemingly endless proliferation of absurdly branded private money over the decade of QE resembles the wild speculation enabled by free-floating exchange rates.
To this familiar opposition, a third pole may be added: central bank digital currency, issued either formally by central banks themselves or — what is functionally equivalent — by the largest private banks. This novel form of money is distinct in that it introduces the prospect of directly imposing socio-political conditions on transactions or penalizing savers through very low interest rates.
It is perhaps for this reason that the more principled neoliberals themselves have joined in to sound the alarm when it comes to some of these innovations. As the historian Adam Tooze has suggested, paraphrasing Antonio Gramsci, “crypto is the morbid symptom of an interregnum, an interregnum in which the gold standard is dead but a fully political money that dares to speak its name has not yet been born.”
Another live issue in contemporary discussions is the status of the dollar as the world reserve currency, an “exorbitant privilege” ratified by the shift to floating exchange rates. The effects of this fateful decision, as a volume published on its fiftieth anniversary records, “went far beyond the international monetary system and have had momentous geopolitical and political as well as economic and financial implications.”
Today, if dollar hegemony remains intact, ever more voices question its permanence, and with it, the ability of the United States to maintain its unrivaled geopolitical position. In this regard, the present moment echoes that of the 1970s, when monetary policy reflected the jostling between world powers and management of the relations among allies. With the introduction of the BRICS basket of currencies and the prospect of de-dollarization it suggests, in the aftermath of Brexit and the eurozone crisis, forecasts of re-regionalization often turn on monetary policy. Still, amid chatter of deglobalization and evidence of a fall in capital flows, the share of transactions conducted in dollars has remained relatively stable over the last decades. Nonetheless, the US “dollar creditocracy” is threatened by the internal contradictions of QE, and the US current account and budget deficits continue to exert downward pressure on the dollar, exacerbating resentment of US unilateralism.
Finally, the liberalization of capital movements in the 1970s must be seen as one side of the exhaustion of economic growth across the advanced industrialized countries; both are effects of overaccumulation and declining productivity growth and have taken the form of secular stagnation. The subsequent period has seen a tremendous explosion of fictitious capital, or financial assets that are in essence claims on future production and profit.
The financialization of the post-Fordist era has produced a lopsided economy, where such claims exceed by significant measure the size of the underlying real economy. Its logic is that of a growthless casino, based on transfer and appropriation largely decoupled from real-world use values. Such a top-heavy dynamic was exactly what produced the over-leveraging responsible for the 2008 meltdown.
Pledges to reregulate and curb the power of finance aside, the metastasis of fictitious capital has continued apace. While the use of some assets — those complex instruments at the heart of the housing and financial crisis, such as CDOs — did indeed decline, the overall quantity of fictitious capital has in fact continued to increase. This dynamic is evinced by the outsize importance of the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector and the run-up in prices of housing and art objects as financialized assets.
Trading in global foreign exchange markets — the marketplace that determines the exchange rate for global currencies and that originates in its modern form from abolishing the Bretton Woods system — soared from negligible levels in the 1970s to a nominal value of $620 billion in 1989 and $4.5 trillion in 2008; by 2022 it stood at $7.5 trillion. Such massive flows of money, buoying what some have called a “technofeudal” rentier class, pose a potentially systemic problem given the attendant pressure to seek their realization in the real economy. In the age of climate overshoot, secular stagnation, and polycrisis, these claims on future production — now far greater than global GDP — create a fundamental dilemma. Given mounting evidence that calls into question the ambition of greening economic growth, efforts to realize future profits of fictitious capital will lead to either unsustainable growth that dangerously destabilizes planetary life or an alternative post-growth scenario, in which societies regain democratic control and turn fictitious capital into stranded assets.
Jeffrey Epstein was on a mission to meet with Vladimir Putin when an intriguing proposal dropped into his email.
The Russian president was ready to receive Epstein, according to an October 2014 message from a correspondent on a database of more than 3.5 million files belonging to the late convicted sex offender that have roiled global politics and business.
“I spoke t= Putin,” wrote the interlocutor, whose identity has been redacted by the US Department of Justice. “He would be very glad if you were to visit and explain=financial markets in the 21 st century. Digital currency. derivative= structured finance. I would set up the meeting when you are next in=Europe. I am sure you two will like each other.”
Hours later, Epstein forwarded the message with a request for advice to Kathy Ruemmler, who’s stepping down as Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s general counsel after details of her association with the disgraced financier emerged in the files released by the Justice Department.
In his response, Epstein anticipated that her advice would be not to go “for the moment” and that was in fact the case. Ruemmler’s reply was brief: “Yes my answer is still the same,” she wrote. “Your fun i= denied.”
The caution at that point was understandable. Months earlier, Putin had sent Russian troops to annex Crimea from Ukraine, prompting wide-ranging US and European Union sanctions and sparking the geopolitical crisis that has since spiraled into the largest conflict in Europe since World War II.
Epstein’s fascination with Putin and Russia was undimmed, though, even as the documents paint a picture of a man who appeared largely clueless about who had genuine power and influence with the Kremlin leader. The files show a years-long effort to secure a one-on-one meeting with Putin, whose name appears about 1,000 times in the database.
The emails are quoted here as they appear in the DOJ release, including spelling and grammatical errors.
Ultimately, it seems, his quest was unsuccessful. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin never met Epstein as far as he’s aware, and no evidence has emerged so far to show that they did.
Earlier that year, in January, Epstein pitched former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjorn Jagland as the politician apparently prepared to meet with Putin in Sochi. The Russian Black Sea resort was shortly to host the 2014 Winter Olympics, the most expensive in history as Putin lavished $50 billion to present the games as a showcase of his country’s post-Soviet restoration.
Sport wasn’t on Epstein’s mind. “you can explain to putin , that there should be a sopshiticated russian version of bitcoin,” he wrote. “it would be the most advanced financial instrument availbale on a global basis.”
Jagland was among the most prominent European politicians at the time as secretary general of the Council of Europe for a decade between October 2009 and September 2019. Jagland met Putin on May 20, 2013, according to the Kremlin’s website, and returned to Sochi in 2014 for the opening of the Olympics.
On May 8, 2013, Epstein asked Jagland to secure him an audience with the Russian leader. “I know you are going to meet putin on the 20th, He is desperate to engage western investment in his country,” the financier wrote. “I have his solution. He needs to securitize russian investment, that means the govt takes the first loss.”
Epstein went on: “I recoginize that there are human rights issues that are at the forefront of your trip howver, if it is helpful to you, I would be happy to meet with him sometime in June and explain the solution to his top prioirty, I think this would be good for your goals. exchange somehting he really wants. for someting you want.”
In a further exchange a few days later, Jagland told Epstein “all this is not easy for me to explain to Putin. You have to do it. My job is to get a meeting with him.”
Epstein replied that Putin “is in a unique position to do something grand, like sputnik did for the space race.” He added: “I would be happy to meet with him , but for a minimum of two to three hours, not shorter.”
Apparently, a counter-offer came from Moscow that failed to enthuse Epstein. On May 21, he claimed in a message to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak that Putin had proposed a meeting during the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum the following month.
“I told him no,” Epstein wrote to Barak. “If he wants to meet he will need to set aside real time and privacy, lets see what happens.”
Days earlier, on May 9, referring to Putin, Epstein admitted to the Israeli politician that “I never met him.”
Two years later, in 2015, Barak wrote to thank Epstein for arranging his own participation at the St. Petersburg forum, where he said he held meetings with Bank of Russia Governor Elvira Nabiullina and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as well as the heads of the country’s two largest banks, Herman Gref of Sberbank and VTB Bank’s Andrey Kostin.
A spokesperson for Barak didn’t immediately offer comment.
As early as November 2010, Epstein was boasting to an unidentified correspondent that he had “a friend of Putin,s” who could help him secure a Russian visa, in response to an apparent party invitation.
Epstein noted on an application form for a year-long Russian visa in 2011 that he’d been issued with visas every year but one between 2002 and 2007, and had traveled to the country. It’s unclear from the files how many times he made use of the visas to visit Russia, though they indicate he made repeated plans to go there.
In April 2018, he received an email advising that his Russian visa was expiring and he’d need an official invitation letter to “renew for a 3 year business visa.” The visa was subsequently issued in June.
Epstein sent more emails to Jagland asking about meetings with Putin until June 2018. That last message, about a month before Putin held his first summit with US President Donald Trump in Helsinki, was the most concise.
“Would love to meet with Putin,” Epstein wrote.
Norwegian authorities started a corruption probe into Jagland this month over his links to Epstein.
Jagland is “fully cooperating with the police and has provided a detailed account of all relevant matters,” his lawyer, Anders Brosveet, said in a statement, declining to comment further. “He denies all charges against him.”
Trump’s election in 2016 gave Epstein more opportunity to cultivate Russian contacts, presenting himself as someone who could explain the political newcomer. This is what Epstein did during Trump’s first term, telling foreign officials how best to deal with the new president, according to one person who knew him at that time, asking not to be identified because the matter is sensitive.
One, apparently, was Vitaly Churkin, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations in New York until his death in February 2017. Epstein claimed to Jagland that he’d coached the late Churkin on how to talk to Trump, and suggested he tell Putin that Lavrov could also “get insight on talking to me.”
Writing in June 2018, Epstein said: “churkin was great . he understood trump after =ur conversations. it is not complex. he must=be seen to get something its that simple.”
According to the DOJ files, Epstein also had regular contact with Sergei Belyakov, a former deputy economy minister and a graduate of Russia’s FSB security service who was involved in organizing the St. Petersburg economic forum. In one 2015 email, Epstein described him as a “very good guy.”
Belyakov didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Epstein bragged about his own FSB connections in another 2015 message to an unknown contact that he’d accused of attempting to blackmail him.
“I felt it necessary to contact some friends in FSB, and I though did not give them your name,” Epstein wrote. “So i expect never ever to hear a threat from you again.”
–With assistance from Ott Ummelas and Dan Williams.
Thousands of Australians are still likely in the dark about losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in their retirement savings. Authorities are still waiting for victims to come forward after more than a $1 billion was quietly lost from superannuation funds of workers across the country.
Social media ads and aggressive sales tactics were used to lure in regular working Australians. That was the case for Queensland woman Claire* who was encouraged to move her superannuation into a new fund and ultimately lost $165,000 when she later learned it had disappeared.
Claire only realised something was wrong when she received a strange email from “equity trustees” which in the moment didn’t mean anything to her at all.
“I was just lucky that I clicked on it,” she told Yahoo Finance.
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Claire, who works in education, admits she isn’t a sophisticated investor. She paid almost no attention to her superannuation but came across an ad while “doomscrolling” Facebook that caught her eye.
“It was along the lines of nine out of 10 super funds are underperforming. Is your’s one of them?” she recalled. “It wasn’t dodgy looking.”
She clicked to find out if her super fund was on the list.
“To get the article you had to put your name and your phone number and your email in, or something like that.”
However when she did, she didn’t get an article. Instead she got a call from a business on the Gold Coast.
Claire was urged to send through her latest superannuation statement, which she did, and that’s when the “constant” calls started.
Despite her reservations and skepticisms – and repeatedly declining their overtures – the pushy tactics from financial advisors on the other end of the line eventually wore her down and she was convinced to move her superannuation from industry fund QSuper to a fund she couldn’t actually find anything about on Google, called NQ Super.
“They essentially had an answer for everything and made it sound safe as houses, and if I didn’t do this I’m an absolute idiot… They sort of played on my naivety and my lack of knowledge of the super system,” she said.
In her late 30s, Claire was promised much higher returns by the time she retired if she switched.
In a subsequent statement of advice put together by an advisory firm called Venture Egg, and seen by Yahoo Finance, she was told the money would be put into mostly standard investments such as the Betashares Nasdaq ETF and Vanguard ETF funds for Australian and international stocks – common, low risk products that track broad sections of the stock market.
Good morning. The “traditional” large‑bank CFO path runs through corporate finance, controllership, and treasury with deep technical accounting credentials. But Citi’s newly appointed CFO, Gonzalo Luchetti, did not take that route. He instead brings what companies now increasingly want in a CFO: an enterprise operator and strategic partner.
Next month, after Citi files its 2025 year-end results, Luchetti will succeed longtime CFO Mark Mason, who will become executive vice chair and senior executive advisor to chair and CEO Jane Fraser. Mason plans to pursue leadership opportunities outside Citi by the end of 2026. His tenure at Citi also encompassed operational experience. According to people familiar with the matter, Mason’s long-term ambition is to become a CEO.
Luchetti has led U.S. Personal Banking since 2021 and joined Citi in 2006. At the recent 2026 Bank of America Securities Financial Services Conference, he discussed his career and global experience.
“I’ve worked in Latin America, in the U.S., in EMEA, in Asia Pacific,” said Luchetti, who described his background as Argentine American. “I lived for six years in Singapore, overseeing 18 markets in the retail bank and the broader consumer franchise. I saw digital develop in different countries and models and applied much of that in the last five years as head of U.S. Personal Banking.”
He has worked across businesses and functions, and at the local, regional, and global levels—starting in the private bank, then moving into wealth and the affluent franchise, and later overseeing the retail bank, unsecured credit cards, and secured mortgages.
“I think he is well equipped and armed to come in as our newly appointed CFO and continue the momentum,” Mason said on a media call last month. Citi (No. 21 on the Fortune 500) reported a profitable fourth quarter to close 2025.
Luchetti’s blend of operating experience, consulting, strategy, P&L leadership, and business‑unit CFO work reflects what many companies now look for in finance chiefs.
What boards want in CFOs now
The CFO role continues to evolve. Boards are seeking CFO candidates with demonstrated leadership beyond finance—particularly “operators” with enterprise-wide influence, according to Russell Reynolds Associates’ research.
Ten years ago, boards focused on controller backgrounds, deep accounting expertise, strong audit committee relationships, and FP&A rigor, Shawn Cole, president and founding partner of executive search firm Cowen Partners, recently told me. Now, he said, boards want CFOs who can lead technology transformation, manage geopolitical supply chain complexity, defend against activists, and navigate volatile capital markets—creating intense competition for a small pool of sitting CFOs with that modern skill set.
At the BofA conference, Luchetti highlighted mid-single digit growth in high-returning areas, like for Services and Wealth deposits and Cards and Wealth loans. Net interest income, excluding Markets, will be up 5%–6% in 2026. “We’ll talk about this at length at Investor Day,” Luchetti said. “Very clearly for us, the biggest objective this year is to deliver what we committed to, which is the 10% to 11% RoTCE [Return on Tangible Common Equity].”
His top priorities as he enters the role are twofold: “Number one, drive consistent, higher returns; and two, pursue excellence in execution.” He said it starts with durability: strong risk and control practices, a solid balance sheet, and ample liquidity, so performance is sustainable over time. In U.S. Personal Banking, that foundation helped Citi deliver 13 straight quarters of positive operating leverage and move returns from 5.5% RoTCE in 2024 to the mid‑teens in the back half of the year, Luchetti noted.
As CFO, he said, he will focus on clear accountability and execution—doing what Citi says it will do, acting early on risks, and maintaining urgency—combined with a “beginner’s mindset” to keep pushing for higher, sustainable returns.
In elevating Luchetti, Citi is effectively betting that the next era of value creation will be led by operator-CFOs.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
Leaderboard
Brian Piper was named EVP and CFO of Sana Biotechnology, Inc. (NASDAQ: SANA). Piper brings more than 25 years of experience. He was previously CFO of Scorpion Therapeutics until its acquisition by Eli Lilly in 2025, and thereafter served as CFO of Antares Therapeutics following its spin-off from Scorpion. Before that, he was CFO of Prelude Therapeutics, a publicly traded biotech company. Earlier in his career, he served as CFO of Aevi Genomic Medicine and spent 13 years at Shire Pharmaceuticals.
Vic Pierni was appointed CFO of Xsolis, a healthcare technology company. He brings more than 25 years of experience. Most recently, he served as CFO of Uniguest, a global digital technologies SaaS provider. Previously, he was CFO of Loftware, an enterprise supply chain SaaS company. Earlier in his career, Pierni held CFO and senior executive roles at Global Capacity and Verivo Software.
Big Deal
KPMG’s recently released Q4 2025 Credit Markets Update finds leveraged finance ended 2025 strongly, creating a borrower‑friendly start to 2026 but with clear medium‑term risks.
New‑issue leveraged loan volume reached about $709 billion in 2025, up from roughly $661 billion in 2024, the second‑highest level since 2021, while high‑yield issuance rose about 16% to more than $330 billion, driven largely by refinancing and a more dovish stance by the Federal Reserve. Refinancing still accounted for 44% of activity, but new‑money LBO and M&A deals led overall volume as the long‑anticipated M&A rebound emerged.
KPMG expects tight spreads, declining base rates, and an issuer‑friendly backdrop to keep capital costs low and support deal flow into early 2026, though data-dependent monetary policy means negative surprises in jobs or inflation could curb further easing.
Going deeper
“Airbnb CEO says AI is ‘the best thing that ever happened to’ his company—he warns other founders: ‘If you don’t disrupt yourself, someone else will’” is a Fortune article by Emma Burleigh.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky says AI has been instrumental to the success of his $73.5 billion short-term rental company. Now, the billionaire founder is telling other business leaders that the tech isn’t just a plus, it’s a necessity. Read more here.
Overheard
“It’s the biggest transformation opportunity in retail. That was really appealing to me.”
—Hillary Super, CEO of Victoria’s Secret & Co., told Fortune in an interview. The company brought her on in fall 2024, after its various rebrands were widely dismissed and sales were falling. She had previously served as global CEO of Anthropologie and, more recently, as CEO of rival lingerie brand Savage X Fenty. When she joined Victoria’s Secret, Super said she was “keenly aware of what the perceptions of the brand were, positive and negative,” but was ready to take on a challenge.
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