In an important provocation, Brett Christophers (2018) points to a strange paradox: as research on value theory and nature has flourished, it has done so without appearing to engage with research on the financialisation of nature. The apparent absence of dialogue between these bodies of work appears to confirm Christophers’ suspicion that Marxist approaches to value could be at risk when it comes to analysing the efflorescing profits of finance. Willing to take up this ‘risk’, he then develops a rich conversation between value theory and finance by considering the value produced within financial practices. In so doing, Christophers demonstrates that finance does produce surplus value and, therefore, can be analysed from a Marxist value-theoretic perspective. The literature on the financialisation of water appears to confirm the paradox that Christophers observes. Thus, several pioneering accounts of water financialisation (Allen and Pryke, 2013; Loftus and March, 2016; Bayliss, 2017; Pryke andAllen, 2017) make explicit reference to value creation, value extraction and the circulation of value without ever clearly specifying what is meant by value: a conversation with value theory thereby appears foreclosed.

In what follows, we take up Christophers’ challenge, but we do so by arguing that a value-theoretic approach to finance can be enriched by simultaneously taking into account a third moment, that of rent. Our paper therefore charts a different path from that pursued by Christophers (2018: 331), for whom the production of risk should be viewed as a source of surplus value. Unconvinced by the category of ‘fictitious capital’ – a claim on future value production – because it suggests that finance is unproductive, Christophers sees the commodification of risk as the best way of accounting for how finance creates value for capital.2 The merit of this ‘in and against’ reading of Marxian value theory is its ability to identify financial services as commodities and highlight the exploitation of labour in the technical work required for production of risk-bearing assets. Nevertheless, while recognising that the labours involved in ‘producing fungible globules of risk’ can indeed be seen as generative of value, we are not convinced this is a sufficient explanation of the magnitude and constitution of profits appropriated on the back of the financialisation of nature and society (indeed the payment of bills or insurance premiums, as any household will directly experience, is a deduction from present and future value in the wage form: no new value is created).