Humor and heuristics: culture,genre, and economic thought in The Big Short

This article uses the 2015 film, The Big Short, to explore the limits of representing and critiquing Wall Street culture on film. Critics have praised the film, suggesting that it offers an account of the 2007–2008 financial crisis that both critiques Wall Street culture and democratizes financial knowledge. I argue that the film is an early representative example of a public narrative based on behavioral economics. A popular movie informed by this discipline has a good deal of political potential for challenging injustices produced by neoliberal approaches to the financial services industry. However, I also argue that despite this political potential, The Big Short is unable to fundamentally challenge the belief in efficient markets that justify many of Wall Street’s practices. I also argue that the film uses unexamined and problematic understandings of both class and gender in characterizing the film’s protagonists.     

Currency and the Collective Representations of Authority,Nationality, and Value

Mainstream economics has consistently ignored the iconography of currency, describing money ‘just’ as a commodity. The paper is going to investigate the economic and political significance of the representations of authority and nationality in currency describing how these representation support its acceptability. The aim of the analysis is double: to decipher the visual identity of currency and its contribution to the acceptance of money in day-to-day transactions, as well as to discuss the operational principles of the monetary system as they are uncovered in the iconography of money. By answering these questions, the paper is going to trace the theoretical presuppositions and the cultural stereotypes that inform the representation of economic value and national identity as they are articulated in banknotes and coins with a specific emphasis on the European Monetary Union and the recent financial crisis that is still affecting its periphery.     

THE OOCYTE MARKET AND SOCIAL EGG FREEZING: From scarcity to singularity

Human oöcytes (eggs) have proved quite resistant to the gift system that regulates much tissue donation in the developed nations. With a few exceptions, they move from donor to recipient through incentive systems, including high rates of compensation and frank payment. Recently, women have turned in small but growing numbers to private oöcyte banking as a way to preserve and defer their fertility. This paper draws on interviews with both clinicians and clients to consider the ways that women use private banking to manage fertility. It argues that the move from purchasing third-party fertility to private banking is a move from a scarcity economy, where lack is resolved in exchange (Simmel), to an economy of singularities (Karpik) where the autologous genetic signature of the materiel renders it non-commensurable. Hence, its value can only be realised through preservation and private retention.     

The performativity of the yield curve

This article explores the wide-ranging influence of the yield curve – a diagrammatic device for representing the term structure of effective interest rates on market-traded debt instruments – in contemporary monetary, financial and economic life. Drawing on the expanding literature on financial performativity, including within the field of cultural economy, the article submits that by virtue of its centrality to multiple, closely interconnected and often highly recursive sets of relations between economies, financial markets and central banks, the yield curve is performative at a range of different levels; and, parsing various different extant understandings of performativity, the article theorizes the particular nature of such performativity in the yield curve context. Against the grain of the bulk of the literature on financial performativity, however, the article also endeavors to connect the yield curve’s performativity explicitly to questions of privilege (the privileges of representation) and power (the power to perform) and their unequal distribution. That is to say, the article argues that to understand the multidimensional performativity of the yield curve, we need to draw out its political as well as cultural economy.     

Towards a commodity theory of token money: on ‘Gold standard thinking in a fiat currency world’

ABSTRACT

Via a discussion of public debates surrounding the potential minting of a trillion dollar platinum coin in the context of the American debt ceiling crises of 2011 and 2013, this essay seeks to make sense of the popular persistence of ‘commodity’ or ‘metallist’ understandings of money's value in the face of a scholarly consensus that all currency is ‘token’ or ‘fiat’ in nature. Scholars from Knapp to Desan have elaborated token theories of commodity money, wherein both precious and non-precious currencies are treated as the products of social construction. By contrast, I suggest the need to supplement such approaches with what I term a commodity theory of token money, wherein money objects made from both precious and non-precious materials are treated as inherently valuable. Exploring the semiotic convergence between gold, Bitcoin and modern paper money, I suggest that the broadly Peircean notion of rhematization in which symbol and indexical signs are (mis)taken for iconic ones is particularly suited to unpack the continuing social salience of commodity theories of money across the gold/paper divide. Moreover attention must be paid to how we define the icon itself.     

The multiple worlds of equity analysts: valuation,volume, and volatility

This paper contributes to the increasing research on how experts within financial institutions co-produce and organize financial markets, and in particular how equity analysts enact stock markets characterized by high volume and volatility. The 20 equity analysts studied give qualitatively different accounts of what, from an outsider's perspective, appear to be very similar work. The analysts understand investment objects, equity markets, and what constitutes good analytical work in qualitatively different ways. This heterogeneity, or multiplicity, could be one source of the, unexplained by orthodox financial theory, ‘excess’ volatility and ‘excess’ trading volume on financial markets. Therefore, the paper complements accounts within heterodox finance theory and sociology-based studies of financial market activities.     

COOLING OUT THE MARKS

Why has the financial crisis not led to more radical public contestation and political reforms? In investigating the muted response to the crisis so far, the paper highlights the significance of ideological fantasy for appreciating the interpenetration of economy and society. We interpret this muted response to the crisis in terms of a ‘cooling out’ process (Goffman) underpinned by a restorative fantasmatic narrative. The ‘enjoyment’ derived from scapegoating individual bankers has narrowed the debate and stifled political imagination and mobilization. By investigating a range of media and policy responses to the meltdown, we conclude that the pre-credit crunch ideology of ‘no more boom and bust’ has been replaced by an equally ideological narrative that promises a re-normalization of processes of financialization. This allows for the preservation of key elements of neo-liberal capitalism as well as the marginalization of alternative projects. The paper shows how, exemplified by the establishment and operation of United Kingdom Financial Investments Ltd, the post-crisis ideology continues to shield financial markets from public scrutiny and intervention.     

‘Its gait is too brisk:’ money mobility in Karachi’s foreign exchange market

ABSTRACT

The global spread of finance capitalism has ushered in a speculative nature of currency trade and has given rise to new forms of subjectivity. Narrowing the ethnographic gaze on a thirty-seven year old currency trader in Karachi, this paper advances two arguments. The first argument relates to the materiality of foreign exchange and their effects on traders’ bodies. In spot trading, the currency traders experience foreign currency as an affective quality breathing down heavily on the senses. The second argument points to an interconnected nature of foreign exchange markets. Using Knorr Cetina and Breugger's notion of ‘global microstructures,’ I demonstrate the ways in which a currency trader, operating in a post-9/11 counter-terrorist surveillance milieu in the country, negotiates the micro and global scales of economy. Grounded in ethnographic research in Pakistan, this paper explores the ways in which foreign currency, especially of the metropole, is circulated, exchanged, and imagined in a postcolonial context, and hence contributes to an emerging scholarship of anthropology of money and finance.     

Trust,reputation and ambiguous freedoms: financial institutions and subversive libertarians navigating blockchain,markets, and regulation

This article departs from the post 2008 financial crisis context, from its intersection with technological developments, and from the socio-technical arrangements configured by this conjuncture. It explores plans and actions – of mainstream financial institutions, and of a community seeking for alternatives to centralised economy and governance – for the use of digital platforms supported by blockchain infrastructure. In particular, it explores how such plans and actions relate to conceptions of public and peer trust and how they appear to produce, or reinforce, reputational imaginaries and quantification practices within added value philosophies. By illuminating a tension between the two identified case examples, I seek to render alternative communities’ and financial institutions’ conceptions, imaginaries and practices (more) visible and to analyse their organisational marketing strategies – where there is a pragmatic and discursive operationalisation of technology as well as of trust as means to gain more self-sovereignty in action, while navigating markets and regulated actual world contexts.     

Cultured meat and cowless milk: on making markets for animal-free food

According to its proponents, animal-free animal food products, such as cultured meat and synthetic cow’s milk, have the potential to overcome various environmental, health and ethical challenges that have emerged around global animal product consumption and the industrial agriculture that is needed to support it. Apart from the myriad of technical problems making animal-free food products, critics have pointed out the blurry ontological status of the food and the ethical challenges therein, and have questioned the veracity of the various promissory narratives being produced. This paper considers animal-free food from a social studies of economies and markets (SSEM) perspective. As a market that currently mostly only exists in potential, an SSEM perspective can reveal the various social and material relations that comprise the (bio)capital formation that will underpin any market-to-be, an aspect of markets that are often invisible once markets are up and running. Moreover, this perspective details the intimate role markets have in establishing the ethical and ontological aspects of animal-free foods in a political economy shaped by neoliberalisation and financialisation.     

A Multitude of Hopes: Humanism and Subjectivity in E.P. Thompson and Antonio Negri

E.P. Thompson's work on working-class formation is widely recognized as one of the crucial contributions to Marxist historiography in the twentieth century. His emphasis on notions of agency and subjectivity is intimately linked to a radical recasting of the socialist agenda against the objectivism of an earlier, ‘orthodox’, Marxism and of a later, and more theoretically sophisticated, structuralism. Thompson's conception of working-class agency as the primary element in historical materialism parallels Antonio Negri's theorization of proletarian subjectivity as an expansive process of collective self-constitution. In particular, Negri's analysis of ‘power’ as an autonomous dynamic of social creation offers an essential development of Thompson's ideas and a fresh theoretical template for the political re-actualization of radical humanism.     

Rethinking saving: Indian ceremonial gifts as relational and reproductive saving

ABSTRACT

Economic anthropology has long advocated a broader vision of savings than that proposed by economists. This article extends this redefinitional effort by examining ceremonial gifts in India and arguing that they are a specific form of savings. Rural households, including those at the bottom of the pyramid, do save, in the sense of storing, accumulating and circulating value. But this takes place via particular forms of mediation that allow savers to forge or maintain social and emotional relations, to keep control over value – what matters in people’s lives – and over spaces and their own future. We propose terming these practices relational and reproductive saving, insofar as their main objective is to sustain life across generations. By contrast, trying to encourage saving via bank mediation may dispossess populations of control over their wealth, their socialisation, their territories and their time. In an increasingly financialised world of evermore aggressive policies to push people into financial inclusion, the social, symbolic, cultural and political aspects of diverse forms of financial mediation deserve our full attention.     

FINANCIAL ENGINEERING,NOT ECONOMIC PHOTOGRAPHY

In recent years, significant studies of finance have explored, on the one hand, the ways in which a specific financial theory might act as a ‘performative utterance’ which through its use makes itself true and, on the other hand, the ways in which discourses and practices of finance might act as continuous performatives that constitute key categories of finance and the financial subject. On first glance, the idea of self-actualising financial theory might seem closer to J. L. Austin's original conception of the performative utterance. However, in this article, I argue for the need to reclaim the Austinian heritage for the broader and more generic understanding of performative finance as well. In this sense, I suggest, a return to Austin reveals the importance of maintaining a focus not only on the potential performance of financial theory, but also those discourses and practices of finance that make up the deeper layers of performativity. I use questions about the role of financial engineering in the sub-prime crisis to illustrate that it is only through a conception of performative finance as self-actualising theories and as discourses and practices that the often obscured layers of financial engineering in society can be fully understood.     

Facing future uncertainties and risks through personal finance: conventions in financial education

ABSTRACT

A crucial component of the neoliberal regime is the shift of responsibility for individuals’ financial well-being and security from the state and other public bodies to the individuals themselves, who are required to take responsibility for their own financial decisions and their current and future economic situation. This project of responsibilization presumes a world in which calculative subjects can estimate and manage future risks. Nonetheless, compelled to engage with the financial sphere as a key means of assuring their economic security, individuals are exposed in fact to the fundamental uncertainty of financial markets. In this article, we examine conventions formulated and communicated by financial education programs as cognitive devices geared to prompt individuals to imagine and engage with finance as a site of knowable, calculable and manageable risks, rather than as a site of fundamental uncertainty. Aiming to instill among the general public a particular cognitive frame based on the idea that possible futures are assessable and the risks that they carry can be managed through engagement with financial products and services, these conventions contribute to the normalization of financial logics in everyday life and the incorporation of the general population into the process of financialization.     

Brain power: cruel optimism and neuro-liberalism in the work of Catherine Malabou

ABSTRACT

One of the under-theorised aspects of Catherine Malabou’s What Should We Do With Our Brain? is the overtly political project that underpins her discussion of a renewed conception of subjectivity. Malabou's political project is framed in radical and emancipatory terms, and yet the possibilities and limitations that stem from of a neurobiological account of politics have been left under-explored. Can we really locate in the brain a progressive politics, especially in the context of debates around mental illness, when so many groups and individuals are resistant to understanding themselves as their brains? Or is this affirmation of scientific materialism at risk of obscuring the realities and complexities of the materiality of cultural practice? In order to pursue the political consequences of her work, this paper looks to stage an encounter between Malabou's account of neuroplasticity and Lauren Berlant's notion of cruel optimism. This is done in order to ask: do Malabou’s own critiques of neoliberal flexibility run the risk of embracing a neuro-liberalism, in which an optimism regarding plasticity, individual liberty, and compromise between the humanities and life-sciences obscures the political limitations of neuroscience as a site for political-philosophy?     

SOURCES OF FINANCIAL SOCIABILITY

This article investigates the sources of sociability in modern financial systems as a prelude to assessing the prospects for financial regulation. Three sources are identified: sociality dependent upon contract, upon relational interdependency, and upon the operation of will and passion. Each of these would provide its own rationale for regulation but it is the third that is stressed here as a radical conception, one that needs to be more fully addressed than has so far proved possible in an analytical context. And it is this conception that connects most closely to a second overall theme of the article which is to explore further the nature of ‘irrationality’ as manifest in financial crises. When the contours of both these aspects of financial calculation have been elaborated, the article moves on to consider how they might shape regulatory responses to the seeming inevitability of financial crises in modern capitalist economies.     

Tipping the Balance

In its emphasis on the legal technicalities this article is concerned with materiality of financial markets – a key theme in social studies of finance. The paper insists on the importance of local legal culture by articulating this concept in distinction to politics. Focusing on the Amendment to Article 1062 of the Russian Civil Code concerning an important class of financial products – cash-settled currency derivatives – it synthesises the insights of actor-network theory and finitism, and argues that local legal culture is a composite of both distributed agencies and interpretative acts.     

On the Symbolic Production of Digital Markets for Cultural Goods

This paper proposes and mobilizes a cultural economic framework to study the dynamic formation of digital markets for cultural goods. Adapting Hayek's theory of price to recent developments in the field of cultural sociology, it proposes the idea that an effective price system condenses information dispersed in society, and then enters into a performative process of symbolic communication that is perceived as ‘authentic’ by the consumers. After analyzing ‘artificial’ and ‘authentic’ current strategies aimed at producing digital markets for cultural goods, which are especially sensitive to the symbolic dimension of price, the article suggests the hypothesis that the digital market has been constructed as a zero- or quasi-zero-price economic space, and that it is the offline and material market of cultural products the one that collects the higher revenues derived from the ‘authentic’ generation of value taking place in the digital marketplace.