Bookforum: the birth of the financial thriller – making a killing in the 1970s

This is a forum containing five interventions on the 2025 book, The Birth of the Financial Thriller – Making a Killing in the 1970s. In the first intervention, the author lays out the book’s key arguments. What follows are three critical commentaries on the book, focusing on the following question: How does reading financial capitalism as a thriller – from the 1970s to today – open new avenues for contemporary social theory and for the study of financialization across the humanities and social sciences? The forum, which brings together perspectives from various disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, concludes with a response by the author to the questions and arguments raised by the contributors.