Introduction
International finance has always been intimately entwined with the media. In the febrile environment of eighteenth-century London and Amsterdam, tip sheets circulated around the coffee shops, and the growing formalization of financial markets in the nineteenth century had media analogues in newspapers such as the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal (Kynaston, 1995).
Recurrent speculative bubbles and “irrational exuberance”, from the Tulip mania and the South Seas Bubble right through to the dot.com boom, have been both the object of the reporting media and one of the key means of propagating expectations until the illogics of speculation are undermined, sometimes by the merest rumor (Kindleberger, 1978; Shiller, 2000; Williams, 2001; Thrift, 2001). For example, rampant speculation in English print media about the supposed “unlimited prospects” of canals in the early nineteenth century was repeated in the Argentine railway bubble of the late nineteenth century, an episode which nearly led to the bankruptcy of one of the era's most powerful institutions: Barings (Tickell, 1996). Similarly, although expressed in ways unavailable to nineteenth-century speculators, the dot.com bubble was also fuelled by claims of a paradigm shift, inscribed and reinforced by the real-time ticker-tapes of the FTSE, NASDAQ and NYSE flowing across the bottom of television screens (and broadcast by CNN, CNBC, BBC 24 and other similar 24-hour news organizations).This chapter explores the ways in which the media impact on money and finance, emphasizing how that inscription is not just changing the practices and protocols of finance, but also the media’s nascent transformations of what counts as finance. As the finance industry pays more attention to the media, we can discern three main effects. First, as financial management is now conducted under the media’s gaze, its practices reflect this scrutiny and, consequently, new forms of calculability are evolving.
Second, the value of financial products is increasingly, therefore, bound up with the media image of those products as new connections are gradually made. Third, the media has come to play an important role of imposing new rhetorics and other forms of (in)disputability on the finance industry as the industry itself has gained audiences whose nature has become the object of constant research and the subject of constant feedback. Here, then, we consider the impact of these effects on the conduct of business in international finance and, specifically, the investment management industry.The chapter primarily focuses on “wholesale” (and mainly international) finance in contradistinction to retail (and mainly domestic) finance. This distinction is routinely made by those who focus on the role and responsibilities of institutional investors in market-driven processes of financial intermediation (Davis and Steil, 2001). Remarkably variegated and complex institutions and services dominate the industry and its centers of trading and transaction (Clark, 2000). Nevertheless, it is clear that the historical differences between these two sectors of finance are increasingly blurred. International finance has made a transition from an almost entirely producer-led industry (dominated by the print-related media) to a more consumer-driven model of sales and distribution (dominated by television and other electronic images).
The chapter is in four main parts. The first part considers the relationship between media and finance in some detail. In particular, we hope to demonstrate that this relationship is not just an epiphenomenal but a constitutive shift. The second part of the chapter then considers how, as a result of the penetration of the media into finance, a whole set of different “financial audiences” have grown up which present a serious challenge to the standard mode of operation of international financial professionals. The third part of the chapter then documents, through participant observation, the belated attempts of a set of investment managers to come to terms with the new mediatized environment in which they now find themselves. The final part of the chapter considers the degree to which the dominance of visual media might prompt a new round of market-related regulation of the international financial markets, one in which financial consumers (or at least their virtual representations) become more important players than heretofore.