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Books > Business & Economics > Economics > Economic theory & philosophy
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Banking on Words (Paperback)
Loot Price: R779
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Banking on Words (Paperback)
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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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