"Informed, educated and more confident": financial capability and the problematization of personal finance consumption

The focus of this paper is the concept of financial capability that has developed within Britain over the last 10 years as a means of problematizing personal finance consumption. It critically examines how authorities have come to delineate the problem of financial capability and how this has been located by them within a wider trajectory of social change and complexity. This is followed by an attempt that explain this emergent concern by positing it as a form of advanced liberal governmentality, while also seeking to trace the contributory role of economic ideas through the concept of virtualism. The paper then seeks to address the particular modality through which financial capability has become a known, measured and assessable attribute of individuals and populations. After outlining the government's National Strategy for Financial Capability, we examine one case study programme within the context of youth work.