Emotions in Finance
Booms, Busts and Uncertainty

A unique account of how booms and busts arise from internal disputes over trust between financial corporations.

Jocelyn Pixley (Author)

9781107633377, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 17 May 2012

304 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.49 kg

'For more than a century economists have ignored the role that emotions play in the economy … this has begun to change - and Pixley's well-known book, now in an expanded and reworked 2nd edition, is part of this important turnaround. Through her empirical data, in combination with a sharp theoretical argument, Jocelyn Pixley has provided us with the best account so far of the crucial role that emotions play in finance, including the current financial crisis.' Richard Swedberg, Cornell University

Money is a promise with future benefits or dangers that are unknowable and incalculable. The financial sector is an attempt to beat uncertainty by speculating on whether prices will rise or fall. No matter how often the folly of this opportunism is shown through crisis after crisis of trust, efforts to defeat uncertainty persist. Yet uncertainty is unavoidable. Squeezed in one place, it emerges in another. Based on extensive interviews with leading actors in the financial sector, this book argues that the only way to cope with uncertainty is by relying on emotions and values. It presents an original explanation of how booms and busts arise from internal disputes over the emotions of trust between global financial corporations. Confidence and suspicion alternate between which strategy may beat competitors and who is cheating whom. Just as the first edition warned of continuing dangers in finance's betrayal of society's trust, this new edition provides a sociological explanation of how these irrational quests for certainty contributed to the current financial crisis in the credibility of money.

1. Modern money, modern conflicts
2. Corporate suspicion in the kingdom of rationality
3. Financial press as trust agencies
4. Required distrust and the onus of a bonus
5. Managing credibility in central banks
6. Hierarchies of distrust from trust to bust
7. Overwhelmed by numbers
8. The time-utopia in finance.

Subject Areas: Organizational theory & behaviour [KJU], Finance [KFF], Economics, finance, business & management [K], Sociology [JHB]