Finance as ‘bizarre bazaar’: using documents as a source of ethnographic knowledge

Markets and finance have long attracted ethnographic interest but the nature of their activity - opaque, secretive, and increasingly placeless – precludes traditional ethnographic fieldwork. In this paper we propose documents as an alternative access point to these organisations as an ethnographic object of enquiry. Documents do not only present a written record, they also enact relationships and encode tacit understandings. We develop Geertz’s work on the bazaar by taking an indire ct route to access the field site – Collateral Debt Obligations – through documents. In reading these documents, we assume the position of investors who, in the absence of alternative publicly available information, are dependent on the documentary accounts made available to them by the sellers. These media act in ways that are similar to tourist guidebooks, a comparison we use to reframe the exchange as one that builds upon sociocultural relations rather than the abstract market relationships described by m ainstream economists. We propose that these documents are not merely representational artefacts of the organisation, but serve to establish and maintain social relationships between buyers and sellers through the management, standardisation and ritualisati on of information disclosed to the investor

Shadow money and the public money supply: the impact of the 2007-2009 financial crisis on the monetary system

This article explores the effects of the political reactions to the 2007–2009 financial crisis on the monetary system. It chimes in with the view that shadow banks create ‘shadow money’, i.e. private substitutes for bank deposits. The article analyses how the three main forms of shadow money – money market fund shares, overnight repurchase agreements and asset-backed commercial papers – were affected by the short-term government intervention and medium-term regulation during and after the 2007–2009 financial crisis in the United States. The analysis reveals that the measures taken between 2007 and 2014 integrated some shadow money forms in the public money supply. In the year after the Lehman collapse, the initially private shadow money supply was either publicly backstopped or de-monetised as it had broken par to bank deposits. The public backstops took on the form of emergency facilities established by the Federal Reserve and guarantees proclaimed by the Treasury. Those backstops imply that the public institutional framework to protect bank deposits was extended to some forms of shadow money during the crisis. This tendency has continued in post-crisis regulation. Accordingly, the 2007–2009 financial crisis has triggered a paradigmatic change in the monetary system, attributable to the political decisions of US authorities