This is a paper about how financial innovation is constructed in different discourses, in financial journalism and official reports as much as in mainstream academic finance or social studies of finance. Written just before the bank bail outs of October 2008, it observes the weakness of popular and official concepts of financial innovation and the tendentiousness of academic concepts from both the market theorists and the social constructionists. From this point fo view, financial innovation  is a powerful and convenient metaphor for progress which has been appropriated in the 1990s and 2000s by those with an interest in the further development of financial markets; and it is not surprising that some of the cheerleaders for innovation, like Robert Shiller, now claim that more (not less) innovation is what is required. The paper then challenges these preconceptions by developing a new concept of financial innovation whose three main elements, frame, conjuncture and bricolage are indicated by the title of this paper. The importance of this problem shift is that it highlights the inherent fragility of this type of intermediary led financial innovation where things will often miscarry.

Keywords

Financial innovation, bricolage, conjuncture, intermediaries, financialised capitalism, financial markets.