Critical political economists have long urged that globalisation and financialisation be studied as products of state behaviour, rather than of unstoppable technological and market forces. This has inadvertently led to a neglect of the thought of those downstream of the “neoliberal thought collectives;” the ex-scientists and engineers who built the technical infrastructure that made globalisation and financialisation possible. Their thought is decidedly post-neoliberal, concerned with the proliferation of both privately issued credit money and highly mathematicised forms of economic reasoning since the 1970s. Focusing on one of the most influential of these figures, Emanuel Derman, the South African born physicist turned Wall Street “quant”, this paper explores under-appreciated features of the post-Bretton Woods economic order. Firstly, the market revolution of the 1980s and 1990s was enabled not merely by a global network of laissez-faire ideologues, but also by the repurposing of technical skills globally. Secondly, from the perspective of these “financial engineers,” technology had far from unleashed quasi-natural self-regulating market forces. On the contrary, Derman insisted that trust in financial models and technologies rested on an extremely precarious co-ordination of the technologies and devices themselves with financial modellers, software engineers, innumerate traders and various other market actors. Given the imprecise and ephemeral nature of financial models, these relations of trust had to be constantly reinforced and re-negotiated. I will show that it is an appreciation of the delicate and precarious nature of these technologies, rather than their omnipotence, that turns Derman into a strong critic of state intervention in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.