Retro-actualization and pre-sequences:A new perspective of financial time in light of the Proteus event

Abstract

Following the collapse of the Bretton Woods Agreements in 1971—which suspended the convertibility of the dollar into gold, dismantled the system of fixed exchange rates, and consolidated the dollar as the international monetary standard—the last decades of the 20th century and the first of the 21st were characterized by increasing deregulation and a speculative boom in financial markets. In this context, the intensive use of new financial instruments (derivatives, futures, among others) proliferated, and profound transformations emerged both in society, described since then as a “risk society” (Beck 1986. Esposito, 2010), and in the economy itself, where forms of “fictitious capital” gained strength (Szepanski, 2023). All of this reversed the classic relationship in which the productive economy drove the financial economy. This landscape, in which uncertainty and speculation act as engines for the generation of financial capital, is radically altered by one of the anomalies associated with the  Proteus event: the emergence of financial data from at least two future points in time. This phenomenon destabilizes the fundamental assumptions of speculation and forces a rethinking of the very notion of time in economics and finance. In order to account for this disturbance, we introduce the concepts of retro-actualization and pre-sequence: the former designating the premature actualization of a future state within the present through the collapse of the distribution of possibilities, and the latter naming the temporal precursor that, by revealing future conditions in advance, shapes the very dynamics that will later bring them about.