Abstract
Social scientists have recently shown how markets are discursively constructed and have documented the role of central banks in these constructions. Although framed as a critique of the neoclassical economic view, this approach still operates within a narrow vision of the world as divided into distinct political, social and economic spheres. Our goal in this paper is to replace this view with an exchange-based understanding of agency and relationality. The puzzle of our paper is one that has captivated academics and practitioners alike: Why did the market respond so powerfully to the Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda’s quantitative easing in 2013? Our focus is on the proliferation within the market and wider society of ‘expectations’. A multiplicity of expectations, of different orders, different kinds, different scales, and different targets folded together to generate the efficacy of this event in central bank politics.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 610-629 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| Journal | Economy and Society |
| Volume | 51 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2022 |
Funding
Over 10 years of work on this paper, we have benefited from comments on various versions presented before numerous audiences and accumulated debts too many to acknowledge here. We want to thank especially our former colleagues at Cornell University’s Global Finance Initiative — Douglas Holmes, Ravi Kanbur, Peter Katzenstein and Jonathan Kirshner for all we learned from our remarkable conversations. We also thank Austin Bryan for his assistance with the preparation of the manuscript.
Keywords
- anthropology of finance
- central banks
- exchange
- expectations
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- History
- Economics and Econometrics
- General Social Sciences