Haldane's Gambit

This article considers the body of work which Andrew Haldane has published since the onset of financial crisis. It draws a distinction between two kinds of criticism in that work: Haldane's interference through political arithmetic on the costs of finance and Haldane's big concept of the financial network using metaphors drawn from the life sciences. His readers have mainly focused on Haldane's innovation through concept and network metaphor while neglecting his political arithmetic and empirics on the costs of finance. But this article argues that Haldane's political arithmetic on costs is an important radical intervention when the finance sector is deflecting reform with a trade narrative about the social benefits of finance.