Anthropologists drawing in part on feminist traditions have long argued that sentiment and affect fundamentally shape capitalist speculation (Bear 2015, Ho 2009, Tsing 2015, Yanagisako 2002, Leins 2018, Zaloom 2004). They have now been joined by economists and policy makers who argue for the significance of narratives and emotion in the 2008-9 Great Recession, the rise of popularism and Brexit. These powerful interventions aim to discover techniques to map and direct contagious accounts and ‘animal spirits’ (Akerloff and Schiller 2009, Schiller 2017). What are we to make of this convergence and are alliances possible? How could we build a critical theory of the political economy of emotions that takes into account macro-economic theory and practical experiments in institutions? These difficult questions will be addressed in relation to current disciplinary and policy experiments—focussing on attempts to produce flows of care and capital on the Global Thames.