In April 2026, The Guardian uncovered that Nigel Farage had received £5 million from Thailand-based cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne.Footnote ¹ The payment came on top of some £25 million in funding given directly by Harborne to Reform UK. Not coincidentally, Reform has proposed cutting capital gains tax on crypto assets, banning banks from closing crypto-linked accounts, and establishing a Bitcoin reserve at the Bank of England. Farage resigned his Clacton seat in July 2026, a move many commentators interpreted as a bid to delay a parliamentary standards investigation. A question dominating British politics in 2026—who paid Farage, and what did they expect in return?—is also the question Benquet and Bourgeron ask about 2016 in their book Alt-Finance: How the City of London Bought Democracy.

The standard media framing of Farage as the anti-elite outsider obscures the fact that he is a product of the City of London. He’s obviously not a well-heeled, Oxbridge-educated Barclays or HSBC banker. Rather, he was a floor trader in metals, one of the rowdiest, least regulated, most speculative corners of London finance, built on open-outcry dealing, short-term price bets, and personal relationships rather than institutional process. Farage skipped university and went straight to work as a trader at the London Metal Exchange, first for the American firm Drexel Burnham Lambert (Michael Milken’s junk-bond house, which collapsed in 1990), then at Credit Lyonnais Rouse, Refco (which also imploded), and finally Natexis Metals.

Farage’s Euroscepticism long predated his election to the European Parliament. He left the Conservative Party in 1992 after John Major signed the Maastricht Treaty and became a founding member of UKIP the following year. Benquet and Bourgeron pointedly situate the Farage family in the declining “traditional City”: he was “the son of a broker, the brother of a broker, and a broker himself,” part of a milieu that suffered both cultural and financial losses after the 1986 “Big Bang” opened the London exchanges to international competition [56]. Farage connects two moments in the City’s political development: the resentment of traditional brokers displaced by financial modernization, and the insurgency of second-wave finance. He was elected to the European Parliament in 1999, where he continued to campaign for Britain to leave the European Union. In 2016, his wish came true.

Alt-Finance argues Brexit was not a revolt of the people against the elites but a victory of one faction of finance over another. Electoral Commission data shows that while the City’s established institutions—what Benquet and Bourgeron call “first-wave” finance—publicly backed Remain, the financial sector as a whole gave the majority of its donations to Leave.

First-wave finance comprises big banks, insurers, and institutional investors whose accumulation depends on regulated stock markets and European integration. The Leave campaign’s financial-sector money, by contrast, came overwhelmingly from “second-wave” finance: hedge funds, private equity firms, and real estate funds operating at the deregulated, over-the-counter margins of the sector. These actors had originally emerged in the regulatory gaps left by the institutional settlement constructed for first-wave finance, eventually becoming “a distinct group” with its own interests [59]. During the 2000s they acquired their independence and “spawned billionaires who, thanks to their fortunes, would be able to massively fund referendums and elections a decade later” [62].

The financial crisis brought these previously obscure institutions into the political spotlight. After 2008, European policymakers introduced the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive, the Capital Requirements Directives, and the European Market Infrastructure Regulation, extending oversight to alternative investment, securitization, shadow banking, and over-the-counter derivatives. This mattered because second-wave finance was much more powerful in Britain than on the continent. As Benquet and Bourgeron neatly put it, “the dominant class in the UK was a dominated class in the European Union” [63]. Large banks and conventional insurers still had reasons to defend European integration, but alternative investment managers increasingly experienced the EU as an obstacle to accumulation. Faced with “a neoliberal political regime of accumulation that no longer protected the institutional arrangement they thought was needed to ensure them increasing profits,” second-wave financiers found a possible way out: “a change of political regime” [65].

These newer actors bankrolled Brexit as the opening move in a larger project of dismantling the neoliberal regime of accumulation and its flagship institutions like the EU and the WTO and replacing them with a “libertarian-authoritarian” regime: radically pro-property and anti-regulation in economics, but repressive and anti-democratic in politics [8]. This conflict produced the distinction between soft and hard Brexit. Banks and insurers sought continued regulatory alignment in exchange for passporting rights, while investment funds demanded a “clean break” that would free Britain from European financial rules even at the cost of access to the Single Market [78]. At its most radical, a no-deal Brexit would have enabled “an aggressive policy of social, fiscal and financial dumping beyond the pale of the European Union” [80].

As the authors summarize their thesis, “Brexit was the consequence of an economic opposition between two factions of the British financial sector that became an institutional and political conflict” [10]. The book makes this argument extremely well.

But Alt-Finance is also a field guide to the political economy of the 2020s. The essential features of second-wave finance circa 2016 are now central to any plausible analysis of the present: patrimonialism, assetization, and profiting off of volatility. Patrimonialism describes a system in which firms are owned or effectively controlled by their founders and senior partners, allowing private fortunes to be deployed politically without the bureaucratic restraints imposed by outside shareholders. The assetization frontier describes the continual conversion of new areas of social and economic life into tradeable claims. Long volatility names an orientation toward rupture rather than stability: a capacity not only to survive crises and price dislocations but to profit from them. Taken together, these three characteristics explain why billionaires have become attracted to political projects that promise disruption, deregulation, and the destruction of existing institutions.

Cryptocurrency is the most obvious extension of the argument—a prospective “third wave” of finance in which all three characteristics become unusually visible. Crypto wealth is highly patrimonial, concentrated among founders and early investors who can turn personal fortunes directly into political expenditure; it manufactures tradeable claims from tokens to Bored Apes to dollars; and it is constitutively long volatility: its leading firms and investors profit from rapid price movements, regulatory uncertainty, and abrupt transformations in the monetary and political environment.Footnote ² The crypto industry’s unprecedented political spending in 2024 offers another especially clear case of “buying democracy.” The objective was not simply to secure a particular regulatory regime but to make opposition to crypto politically impossible across both parties in the United States. The Trump family’s expanding crypto empire collapses the remaining distance between political power, personal enrichment, and financial deregulation.

At roughly the same time that Alt-Finance appeared, a growing literature on “asset manager capitalism” began to describe the power accumulated by institutions such as BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street.Footnote ³ In an exchange in the Journal of Cultural Economy, Bourgeron explained that what distinguishes second-wave actors from the asset manager capitalism of BlackRock or Vanguard is not only where they invest but how they are owned and paid. Mainstream asset managers are bureaucratically owned and remunerated principally according to the volume of assets under management. Their interests therefore lie in high, stable asset prices. Alternative managers are more commonly owned by their partners and remunerated according to investment returns. As Bourgeron puts it, mainstream managers make money from assets “that have already been assetized,” while alternative managers operate “at the forefront of assetization.” Because the latter can benefit from periodic busts that create opportunities to purchase assets cheaply and generate exceptional future returns, they may have an interest in “chaotic political changes leading to major market instability.”Footnote ⁴

Melinda Cooper has recently extended this argument into the American context while giving the division a more precise legal and institutional history.Footnote ⁵ New Deal securities law separated public-facing institutional investors, such as mutual and pension funds, from private investment partnerships serving small groups of wealthy and ostensibly sophisticated investors. Institutional managers were subject to disclosure rules and prohibited from employing many high-risk investment techniques or charging performance fees. Private funds were permitted to use leverage and derivatives and to claim carried interest, but only because they were originally restricted to a small circle of private investors. Regulation D broke down that barrier in 1982 by allowing mutual funds, pension plans, and university endowments to invest in private equity, venture capital, and hedge funds. Private investment partnerships could thereafter leverage the savings of hundreds of thousands of workers while preserving their preferential taxation, performance fees, and autocratic organizational structures.

Cooper describes the resulting relationship as a “conflicted symbiosis.” Institutional and private funds need one another but retain distinct economic interests. Mutual and index fund managers are paid largely according to assets under management and therefore seek stable asset prices and government-backed markets into which they can channel ever-larger quantities of savings. Private investment managers make their greatest fortunes through capital gains, carried interest, and founders’ stock. They have correspondingly stronger interests in low capital gains taxation, regulatory exemptions, and large movements in asset valuations. This economic division increasingly maps onto American party politics. BlackRock became deeply embedded in the Democratic policy apparatus under Biden, while the founders and general partners of private equity firms, hedge funds, and venture-capital partnerships moved decisively toward Trump. Cooper explicitly credits Benquet and Bourgeron with anticipating in Britain the factional division that subsequently emerged in the United States. Cooper demonstrates the portability and generative power of Benquet and Bourgeron’s framework: the cleavage they identify in British finance illuminates a parallel reorganization of American capitalism.

The framework also extends readily to the technology industry. Many technology companies are patrimonial, or functionally so: concentrated founder control allows their owners to fund political projects without being meaningfully constrained by ordinary mechanisms of institutional shareholder oversight.Footnote ⁶ They are positioned at the frontier of assetization, transforming attention, personal data, artificial intelligence, space exploration, and cryptocurrency into proprietary assets. The EU’s crowning regulatory achievements—the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act in particular—now play a role for parts of the technology industry comparable to that played by post-2008 European fund regulation for the Brexiteers.

Cooper’s account gives the American version of this realignment a particularly clear material basis. The upper echelon of Silicon Valley founders and venture capitalists moved toward Trump in response to cryptocurrency enforcement by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Lina Khan’s antitrust policy at the Federal Trade Commission, and Democratic proposals to tax unrealized capital gains. They were simultaneously pulled rightward by the reorientation of technology investment toward defense, fossil-fuel extraction, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence. Under Trump, private-investment billionaires ceased to be donors operating at a distance and entered government directly, importing “the notoriously autocratic, hierarchical and capricious style of the private investment founder deep into the heart of government” [Cooper 2026, 14–16]. This closely resembles what Benquet and Bourgeron call “the merging of the dominant class and the state” [116].

European digital regulation, among other things, has prompted a similar radicalization among sections of the Silicon Valley elite.Footnote ⁷ Elon Musk campaigned for the Alternative für Deutschland party before the German elections and used his control of X to amplify Tommy Robinson and Călin Georgescu. His public break with Farage should not be mistaken for a turn toward moderation. Musk instead aligned himself with Rupert Lowe and the breakaway Restore Britain party, whose platform includes mass deportations, banning the burqa, and reinstating the death penalty. Such interventions exemplify the libertarian-authoritarian synthesis identified by Benquet and Bourgeron: the demolition of institutions capable of regulating private property is paired with the enlargement of the state’s punitive and coercive powers.Footnote ⁸ The book’s final chapter describes the emerging regime in similar terms, as one in which social and civil rights are restricted while alternative financial actors open previously unfinancialized domains to profit [89].

The book therefore provides a persuasive structural explanation for authoritarianism. After decades of austerity, privatization, and growing inequality, further financialization cannot be secured through popular consent alone. Where redistributive institutions no longer compensate the losers, “the use of force is the only instrument left to regulate social life and enforce social order” [115]. Neoliberalism has emptied out the welfare state’s integrative “left hand,” leaving the dominated classes “saturated with discontent” even when they have not been converted to a socialist alternative [119–120]. Libertarian authoritarianism protects the gains already made by capital while preemptively suppressing resistance to the next round of dispossession.

Alt-Finance convincingly explains why second-wave financiers opposed Britain’s continued membership in the European Union. It is less clear how that opposition metastasized into neofascism. The authors acknowledge that “a patient effort was needed to build a coalition of political interests, resolve institutional power struggles, and spread the new shared ideology” before the neoliberal regime could be transformed into a libertarian-authoritarian one [89]. Yet the book’s analysis of the processes of coalition-building and ideological production remains less developed than its exploration of financial interests.

In particular, the book underemphasizes how forty years of neoliberalism in the UK prepared the social and institutional ground for the far right.Footnote ⁹ Neoliberal policies from Thatcher to Blair to Cameron weakened trade unions and public services, made households dependent on housing and pension assets, and hollowed out the democratic institutions that might have resisted concentrated wealth. The result was a society in which financial power could be readily translated into political power. Alt-Finance is rigorously materialist, yet it also points toward the limits of a purely materialist analysis. Neoliberalism has placed extraordinary power in the hands of a tiny minority, but that minority has also, in significant part, gone insane. Economic interests explain the direction of the project but do not fully explain its conspiracism, racial paranoia, apocalypticism, and appetite for cruelty. These pathologies are not detached from material interests, but neither are they reducible to them.

Benquet and Bourgeron conclude that the emerging order “does not aim for the sustainable reproduction of the dominant classes” and “is not built to last” [126]. Its “out-of-this-world” financiers seek instead to “empty the shop before it closes,” extracting as much as possible before ecological and social conditions reach breaking point [127]. Earlier regimes of accumulation sought, however unevenly and unjustly, to stabilize the social, political, and legal conditions for future accumulation. Our current regime cannibalizes those conditions, cashing in the rule of law, state capacity, democracy, geopolitical stability, and ecological habitability for a few pieces of digital silver.