‘Gold diggers’ are (usually) women looking for rich male partners to offer luxury lifestyles; ‘trophy wives’ are women chosen by men as partners primarily due to their attractiveness and ‘prestige value’. In his darkly funny expose of lurid and morally bankrupt finance industry worker lifestyles, Geraint Anderson’s book City Boy (2008) includes descriptions of bars around the City where male traders and analysts could easily hook up with gold diggers and trophy wives should they wish.

I first came across this phrase in UK cultural analyst Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (first published 2009). The book examines the social indoctrination of neo-liberal modes of thought about the ‘free market’ and how these have been culturally normalised, even internalised into people’s ideas about themselves, their relationships and what is possible in society. Canadian sociologist Professor Max Haiven takes the idea of the ‘finalisation of the imagination’ even further in his detailed overview and critique of the artworld’s engagement with finance and financialisation in Art After Money: Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialisation (2018).