This presentation explores the private sector as a realm for enacting political and ethical visions of economic future-making. Drawing on twelve years of ethnographic fieldwork in Ghanaian privately owned medium- to large enterprises in the fields of media, finance, and services, I analyse how building private sector institutions articulates with historic political visions of building an economy that counters the power of foreign imperial actors. I zoom in on how business-owners in the capital Accra distinguish between “home-grown” capital and global speculative capital, and seek to leverage domestically sourced financing for building their enterprises in an economy where foreign investors and corporations dominate. These distinctions show that even financial capital exists in diverse qualities – it is not a unitary force, but people make comparisons between and evaluate the effects of different kinds of capital. This points towards the possibility of developing an ethnographic theory of capital, which takes seriously local evaluations of how capital becomes, or ceases to be, productive – in the case of Ghanaian business-owners, what kind of capital materialises growth and “development” in Ghana, and what kind of capital reproduces imperial structures of extraction.