Phantastic objects and the financial market's sense of reality : a psychoanalytic contribution to the understanding of stock market instability

This paper sets out to explore if standard psychoanalytic thinking based on clinical experience can illuminate instability in financial markets and its widespread human consequences. Buying, holding or selling financial assets in conditions of inherent uncertainty and ambiguity, it is argued, necessarily implies an ambivalent emotional and phantasy relationship to them. Based on the evidence of historical accounts, supplemented by some interviewing, the authors suggest a psychoanalytic approach focusing on unconscious phantasy relationships, states of mind, and unconscious group functioning can explain some outstanding questions about financial bubbles which cannot be explained with mainstream economic theories. The authors also suggest some institutional features of financial markets which may ordinarily increase or decrease the likelihood that financial decisions result from splitting off those thoughts which give rise to painful emotions. Splitting would increase the future risk of financial instability and in this respect the theory with which economic agents in such markets approach their work is important. An interdisciplinary theory recognizing and making possible the integration of emotional experience may be more useful to economic agents than the present mainstream theories which contrast rational and irrational decision-making and model them as making consistent decisions on the basis of reasoning alone

Speculation in international crises: report from the Gulf

Recent years have seen recurring international financial crises, as well as a tremendous rise in trading and speculation. How are the two related? Are speculators and trading responsible for market volatility? This paper presents a study of the Gulf Crisis of 1990–1991, examining the behavior of the international oil market during a period of unprecedented volatility. The analysis suggests that a combination of political events and market fundamentals, rather than trading, was behind this volatility. Journal of International Business Studies (2005) 36, 576–587. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400158