The global financial and more widely economic crisis which began in 2007–2008 has been a crisis indelibly of political economy. This fact has led scholars of finance ‘back’ to political economy, where geographers’ interest in finance first materialized in the 1980s. In this light, this article reviews recent work on the geographical political economy of the crisis, highlighting such work’s main themes, contributions and lacunae. It shows that this work has been powerfully influenced by developments in geographical political economy, and by the latter’s engagement with alternative intellectual traditions, over the past three decades. But it argues also that the attempt to theorize and document the place of finance within geographical political economy remains very much an ongoing project.