Asset without an image: collateralised debt obligations and calculative instability

If the ‘asset condition’ is increasingly a defining feature of financialised capitalism, then this would seem to point towards the emergence of new crisis tendencies linked to the distinctive logics of the asset form. This article draws on the case of collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) and the archival record of Lehman Brothers’ securitisation pipeline in arguing the need for an ‘asset-centred’ analysis of financial fragility which foregrounds the ongoing, purposive construction of futurity through valuation, financial engineering and de-risking. I argue that the uneven and spatially distributed articulation of assets through diverse valuation practices can introduce a quality of ‘calculative instability’ which threatens the management of the rent relations on which assets depend. In the CDO case, I show that this quality was produced by the co-evolution of valuation techniques and the technical form of the CDO. Within Lehman Brothers, these devices were linked together across fragile circuits of securitisation and eventually came to work at cross-purposes in managing the mortgage origination process. The connections between the spatially distributed constitution of assets and the emergence of differing semiotics of valuation captured here have broader relevance for understanding how asset values are constructed and why they prove fragile.