Money Talks

Description

Money Talks explores the ways the concepts of money and capital are understood and talked about by a range of people, from traders to ordinary investors, and how these accounts are framed and represented across a range of media. This collection brings together leading writers and emerging researchers to demonstrate how work in media and cultural studies can contribute to debates around the meanings of money, the operations of capital, and the nature of the current crisis. Drawing on a range of work from across disciplines, Money Talks offers a provocative and pathbreaking demonstration of the value of incorporating approaches from media and cultural studies into an understanding of economic issues.

Financial speculations: Contested constructions of markets and crisis

Graham Murdock

 

Part 1: Insider talk

 

Chapter 1: Financial insider talk in the city of London

Aeron Davis

 

Chapter 2: Funny in a rich man’s world: The contradictory conceptions of money in forex trading

Peter A. Thompson

 

Chapter 3: Stating support for the city: Thirty years of budget talk

Catherine Walsh

 

Part 2: News talk 

 

Chapter 4: More of the same: News, economic growth and the recycling of conventional wisdom

Justin Lewis and Richard Thomas

 

Chapter 5: Conflict of interest disclosure in economics: Will journalists aid the cause?

George DeMartino

 

Chapter 6: Trouble in the markets: Differentiation in the Norwegian financial news landscape

Nina Kvalheim and Helle Sjøvaag

 

Chapter 7: Covering the crisis: Politics and culture

Jostein Gripsrud

 

Part 3: Screen talk

 

Chapter 8: No guns, no rules, just pure capitalism! Hollywood’s portraits of Wall Street

Anja Peltzer

 

Chapter 9: System down! Three documentary accounts of crisis

John Corner

 

Part 4: Everyday talk 

 

Chapter 10: ‘I just hope the whole thing won’t collapse’: ‘Understanding’ and ‘overcoming’ the EU financial crisis from the citizen’s perspective

Andreas Hepp, Swantje Lingenberg, Monika Elsler, Johanna Möller, Anne Mollen and Anke Offerhaus

 

Afterword: Business as usual and its discontents

Graham Murdock

Sujets

• Communication médiatique
• Media
• Industrie
• Communications
• Cultural Studies
• Business
• Economics
• Media studies
• Politics
• Consumerism
• Marketing et communication
• Industries

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783204137
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2015 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2015 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Part of the Changing Media, Changing Europe series
Series ISSN: 1742-9439 Electronic ISSN: 2043-7803
Cover designer: Holly Rose Copy-editor: MPS Technologies Production manager: Tim Mitchell Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-405-2 ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-412-0 ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-413-7
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
Contents
Introduction
Financial speculations: Contested constructions of markets and crisis
Graham Murdock
Part 1: Insider talk
Chapter 1: Financial insider talk in the city of London
Aeron Davis
Chapter 2: Funny in a rich man’s world: The contradictory conceptions of money in forex trading
Peter A. Thompson
Chapter 3: Stating support for the city: Thirty years of budget talk
Catherine Walsh
Part 2: News talk
Chapter 4: More of the same: News, economic growth and the recycling of conventional wisdom
Justin Lewis and Richard Thomas
Chapter 5: Conflict of interest disclosure in economics: Will journalists aid the cause?
George DeMartino
Chapter 6: Trouble in the markets: Differentiation in the Norwegian financial news landscape
Nina Kvalheim and Helle Sjøvaag
Chapter 7: Covering the crisis: Politics and culture
Jostein Gripsrud
Part 3: Screen talk
Chapter 8: No guns, no rules, just pure capitalism! Hollywood’s portraits of Wall Street
Anja Peltzer
Chapter 9: System down! Three documentary accounts of crisis
John Corner
Part 4: Everyday talk
Chapter 10: ‘I just hope the whole thing won’t collapse’: ‘Understanding’ and ‘overcoming’ the EU financial crisis from the citizen’s perspective
Andreas Hepp, Swantje Lingenberg, Monika Elsler,
Johanna Möller, Anne Mollen and Anke Offerhaus
Afterword: Business as usual and its discontents
Graham Murdock
Notes on contributors
Index
Introduction
Financial speculations: Contested constructions of markets and crisis
Graham Murdock
The commercial world is very frequently put into confusion by the bankruptcy of merchants, that assumed the splendour of wealth only to obtain the privilege of trading with the stock of other men, and of contracting debts which nothing but lucky casualties could enable them to pay; till after having supported their appearance a while with tumultuary magnificence of boundless traffic, they sink at once, and drag down into poverty those whom their equipages had induced to trust them.
Dr Samuel Johnson 1752 (quoted in Atwood 2012: 9)
I’m forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air. They fly so high, nearly reach the sky. Then like my dreams, they fade and die.
(Chorus of a popular song first released in 1918)
R ecent years have seen talk about the centrality of money and finance move to the centre of public and private life. Discourses around debt and credit, consumption and austerity, increasingly pervade discussion, from debates on the politics of national accounting to anxieties over personal living standards. This resurgence of interest has been prompted in large part by the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the continuing attempts of governments across the advanced capitalist world to manage its consequences. It is against this background of crisis and response that the contributions to this volume address the ways that economic and financial affairs have been talked about and represented across a range of social sites and media genres.
As the French political economist Thomas Piketty has argued, journalists, commentators and citizens need to ‘take a serious interest in money’ since ‘those who have a lot of it never fail to defend their interests’ (Piketty 2014: 577). The response to crisis throws into sharp relief both the limits of the information and interpretive frameworks offered to the public and the resilience of the narratives generated by those benefitting most from the restoration of business as usual.
The discussions presented here, originated in a series of seminars on the contemporary public sphere, organized as part of the ‘Changing Media, Changing Europe’ programme funded by the European Science Foundation, pays particular attention to Europe. But since the crisis originated in the United States, involved financial institutions with global reach, and has been explored in feature films and documentaries with international distribution, consideration of talk about its causes and consequences inevitably escapes national and regional boundaries.
To understand constructions of the current crisis and reactions to it, we need to return to an earlier moment of crisis, in the 1970s. The policy and ideological responses that crystalized then laid the essential foundations for the crash of 2007–2008 and its continuing aftermath, setting in motion both the dynamics that would create it and the prevailing discourses though which it would be represented and understood.
Gathering storms
As Wolfgang Streeck has noted, it is now generally accepted that ‘[t]he late 1960s and early 70s’ marked ‘a watershed in the history of post-war democratic capitalism’ (Streeck 2012: 28). Consumer demand for the mass-produced standardized goods that had fuelled the long boom was stagnating. The competitiveness of the core capitalist economies was increasingly challenged by emerging economic powers, led by Japan. Profits were further squeezed in 1973–1974 by a four-fold hike in the price of oil. Corporations moved to tackle their increasing costs. Unemployment increased. Retail prices rose, and by 1974 inflation in the world’s largest economy, the United States, had reached 10%, over triple the 3% rate for 1966.
This 1970s’ crisis of accumulation precipitated a radical break with the post-war intellectual consensus on the nature of advanced capitalism and how best to manage it. The styles of state management, public investment and regulation associated with Maynard Keynes were increasingly replaced by market-oriented views. The new thinking was underpinned by three assumptions:
First, the expanding services sector of the economy was seen as displacing manufacturing as the principle engine of recovery and competitiveness in the advanced capitalist economies. Routine assembly jobs were moved ‘offshore’ to low-wage economies. The key industries of the future would be those that traded in information, cultural goods, communication and intangible assets. The financial services provided by banking, investment and insurance rapidly emerged as pivotal to visions of this new ‘weightless’ economy and were enthusiastically promoted in dominant rhetorics. Within the financial sector this fostered both a sense of separation from the declining industries of the ‘real’ economy and an assumption that future economic growth required new, innovative financial products.
Second, within both government and the financial industries, the rapidly increasingly processing power offered by advanced computing, and the mathematical modelling of markets it facilitated, came to be seen as the solution to the problems posed by managing a more complex financial environment. As one leading enthusiast of modelling has noted, ‘When computers first made economic modelling feasible, the mystique of the machine raised expectations that models built with it would prove as infallible as the machine’s arithmetic’ (Clopper 2012: vi). This belief was buoyed up by the successful manned moon landing in 1969. But economic modelling was not rocket science. Its utility depended on the assumptions about human behaviour that underpinned it.
The dominant models factored out any consideration of the vicious circle of debt-financed investment that Dr Johnson had warned against in the quotation that heads this Introduction. ‘He was talking about merchants, but substitute banks and large corporations, and it’s much the same story’ (Atwood 2012: 9). The financial industry and mainstream economics failed dismally to predict either the coming collapse of the ‘tumultuary magnificence of boundless traffic’ in new financial products or its dire consequences for public services and ordinary people’s living standards. Their assumptions were based firmly on the belief that market behaviour was governed by rational calculation in the pursuit of personal advantage. They took little or no account of collective enthusiasms and panics. As David Freedman has argued, ‘It was the supposed strength of risk models that gave investment firms the confidence to leverage their bets with massive sums of borrowed money’ adding that ‘in no area of human activity [was] so much faith placed in such flimsy science’ (Freedman 2011: 76). It was a delusion shared by both those working in the finance industries and those responsible for overseeing their operations. As Alan Greenspan, Chair of the US Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, later admitted, it led him to preside over a crash that he ‘never saw coming’ (Greenspan 2013: 90). Attributing a central role to the failures of computer systems, however, all too easily allows the core economic actors in the crisis to evade responsibility and ignores the key role played by neo-liberal ideology in shaping their actions.
By undermining the credibility of the dominant post-war style of political economic management based on extensive regulation of corporate activity and, in Europe, public ownership and operation of key infrastructural sectors, the crisis of the 1970s opened the way for a ‘solution’ based on privatizing state assets