This paper addresses the theme of ‘the power of words’ by focusing on the rhetorical strategies that surround the reform of the banking sector in the UK. In particular, we argue that the psychoanalytic category of fantasy is central to developing a full understanding of political rhetorics as well as the challenges and opportunities for structural change in the domain of finance, not least because it furnishes us with a way to account for how identity and subjectivity are implicated in those structures. Drawing on the Essex School of Political Discourse Theory (Laclau & Mouffe 1985; Laclau 1991; Howarth, Norval, Stavrakakis 2000; Glynos 2001), our paper sketches out an analytical framework that suggests how affect and desire play a special role in the politics of financial reform. We adopt a ‘logics approach’ to critical explanation (Glynos & Howarth 2007) that is grounded in an understanding of structures as ontologically incomplete and articulated as an assemblage of social, political and fantasmatic lo...