Balance Sheet Aesthetics and the Racial Contours of Cost:On Investment Imaginaries and Inequality

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.