In this provocative look at one of the most important events of our
time, renowned scholar Arjun Appadurai argues that the economic
collapse of 2008—while indeed spurred on by greed, ignorance, weak
regulation, and irresponsible risk-taking—was, ultimately, a failure
of language. To prove this sophisticated point, he takes us into the
world of derivative finance, which has become the core of contemporary
trading and the primary target of blame for the collapse and all our
subsequent woes. With incisive argumentation, he analyzes this
challengingly technical world, drawing on thinkers such as J. L.
Austin, Marcel Mauss, and Max Weber as theoretical guides to showcase
the ways language—and particular failures in it—paved the way for
ruin. Appadurai moves in four steps through his
analysis. In the first, he highlights the importance of derivatives in
contemporary finance, isolating them as the core technical innovation
that markets have produced. In the second, he shows that derivatives
are essentially written contracts about the future prices of
assets—they are, crucially, a promise. Drawing on Mauss’s The Gift
and Austin’s theories on linguistic performatives, Appadurai, in his
third step, shows how the derivative exploits the linguistic power of
the promise through the special form that money takes in finance as
the most abstract form of commodity value. Finally, he pinpoints one
crucial feature of derivatives (as seen in the housing market
especially): that they can make promises that other promises will be
broken. He then details how this feature spread contagiously through
the market, snowballing into the systemic liquidity crisis that we are
all too familiar with now. With his
characteristic clarity, Appadurai explains one of the most
complicated—and yet absolutely central—aspects of our modern
economy. He makes the critical link we have long needed to make:
between the numerical force of money and the linguistic force of what
we say we will do with it.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780226318806
Publisert
2018
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Vendor
University of Chicago Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter