Douglas R. Holmes

Fast Capitalism: Para-Ethnography and the Rise of the Symbolic Analyst

The social theorist’s oscillation between the market as the artifact of knowledge and as evidence of its limits finds powerful expression in the events now shaping the financial world. In the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis and the consciousness of so-called “systemic risk” amplified, the failure of the economic models that were the source of central bankers’ expertise to offer useful predictions or finetuned policy solutions to recent market problems, and current efforts by global banks to do away with the regulation and management of the market by state actors altogether... [T]he central bankers at the Bank of Japan...were both amazed at what they imagined as their own creation—a global market of seemingly infinite scale and complexity—and fearful of their own powerlessness vis-a-vis their creation. In particular, these central bankers’ sense of powerlessness took the form of a heightened awareness of the contradictions in their role as creators and guardians of the global market. (Riles 2001: 6

Public Currency: Anthropological Labor in Central Banks

This article examines the operation of an emerging monetary regime in which ‘mere words’, as Yellen, Janet (2013. ‘Communications in Monetary Policy.’ Speech presented at the Society of American Business Editors and Writers 50th Anniversary Conference, Washington, DC, April 4) recently noted, play a decisive role. Drawing on my field research in five central banks – the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Bundesbank, the Bank of England, the Riksbank, and the European Central Bank – I address how this regime, which I term a ‘public currency’, works in theory and practice and what is at stake in its regulation and management. At the heart of this regime is a far-reaching premise: the public must be broadly recruited to collaborate with central banks in achieving the ends of monetary policy, namely ‘stable prices and confidence in the currency’. I further argue that monetary policy is now being aligned overtly with public interests, interests that are not fully or necessarily reducible to the prerogatives of finance or the interests of financial markets.