- [UNTITLED]
- Acknowledgments
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Global Finance And Its Institutional Spaces
- Politics And Financial Markets
- Finance And Institutional Investors
- Business Groups And Financial Markets As Emergent Phenomena
- Central Banking And The Triumph Of Technical Rationality
- What is a financial market? Global markets as microinstitutional and post-traditional social forms
- Auctions And Finance
- Interactions And Decisions In Trading
- Traders And Market Morality
- The Material Sociology Of Arbitrage
- Seeing Through The Eyes Of Others: Dissonance Within And Across Trading Rooms
- Market Efficiency: A Sociological Perspective
- Financial Analysts
- Rating Agencies
- Accounting And Finance
- The International Monetary Regime And Domestic Political Economy: The Origin Of The Global Financial Crisis
- A Long Strange Trip: The State And Mortgage Securitization, 1968–2010
- Dead Pledges: Mortgaging Time And Space
- Financial Crises As Symbols And Rituals
- The Sociology Of Financial Fraud
- The Disunity Of Finance: Alternative Practices To Western Finance
- Islamic Banking And Finance: Alternative Or Façade?
- Geographies Of Finance: The State-Enterprise Clusters Of China
- The Financialization Of Art
- Historical Sociology Of Modern Finance
- Gender And Finance
- The Role Of Confidence In Finance
- Finance In Modern Economic Thought
- Financial Automation, Past, Present, And Future
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
This article explores the application of technical rationality to the control of the money supply. It argues, on the one hand, that developed economies, like the United States, have moved inexorably toward greater control of the money supply by technocrats. On the other hand, we are struck by the dangers of that technocratic control. A technical elite, with significant autonomy from oversight, has interpretive techniques of considerable power. In the end, the Fed's performance in October 1979 can be seen as a brilliant piece of political theatre. But, as in the recent financial crisis, the performance is not always going to be reviewed so admiringly.
Keywords: central banking, technical rationality, money supply, monetary policy, technocrats, Federal Reserve
Mitchel Y. Abolafia is Professor in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany/State University of New York. He has also taught at Sloan School of Management at MIT, Johnson School of Management at Cornell, and the School of Management, University of California at Davis. He is the author of Making Markets: Opportunism and Restraint on Wall Street (1997). He holds a BA in Sociology from Tufts University, and a PhD in Sociology from Stony Brook University.
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- [UNTITLED]
- Acknowledgments
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Global Finance And Its Institutional Spaces
- Politics And Financial Markets
- Finance And Institutional Investors
- Business Groups And Financial Markets As Emergent Phenomena
- Central Banking And The Triumph Of Technical Rationality
- What is a financial market? Global markets as microinstitutional and post-traditional social forms
- Auctions And Finance
- Interactions And Decisions In Trading
- Traders And Market Morality
- The Material Sociology Of Arbitrage
- Seeing Through The Eyes Of Others: Dissonance Within And Across Trading Rooms
- Market Efficiency: A Sociological Perspective
- Financial Analysts
- Rating Agencies
- Accounting And Finance
- The International Monetary Regime And Domestic Political Economy: The Origin Of The Global Financial Crisis
- A Long Strange Trip: The State And Mortgage Securitization, 1968–2010
- Dead Pledges: Mortgaging Time And Space
- Financial Crises As Symbols And Rituals
- The Sociology Of Financial Fraud
- The Disunity Of Finance: Alternative Practices To Western Finance
- Islamic Banking And Finance: Alternative Or Façade?
- Geographies Of Finance: The State-Enterprise Clusters Of China
- The Financialization Of Art
- Historical Sociology Of Modern Finance
- Gender And Finance
- The Role Of Confidence In Finance
- Finance In Modern Economic Thought
- Financial Automation, Past, Present, And Future
- Index