The media becomes the money
Until the 1960s, the international finance industry received press attention but not much reader attention. Although there had been episodes of intense general interest
Performingfmance 167 in the stock market (see Kurtz, 2000; Shiller, 2000) there remained no general constituency (as there now appears to be).
Even in the United States, international finance remained the preserve of a relatively small number of elites, often connected with the industry (Henwood, 1997; Mayer, 1997). However, from the 1960s, this situation began to change as finance skills began to migrate out of their traditional realm and into corporations. Nonfinancial companies found that “disintermediation”, raising money directly in the financial markets, was cheaper than borrowing money from banks. Similarly, particularly after the fiscal crisis of New York, US municipalities intervened directly in bond markets (Soybel, 1992).1 More generally, financial literacy began to increase as individual share-holding became more common. Financial information began to become more available at a cheaper price because of technological advances at the same time as a cultural shift took place in the perception of financiers. In Britain, for example, finance was no longer seen as an acceptable career for the not very bright second son of a minor aristocrat. It is now seen as a desirable career for the most able and ambitious university graduates. These developments, in turn, have created a domestic and global market for financial publications.In the early phase of the financialization of Anglo-American societies, the media responded with a set of specialist publications such as Euromoney (“the journal of the capital markets”). In the 1980s and 1990s, however, this situation significantly changed. International finance became more and more visible as the volume of international financial transactions multiplied rapidly - most markedly in the case of derivatives trading, which grew by 2,800 per cent in the decade to 1997 (Tickell, 2000).
Culturally, too, finance began to exert an important influence, coming to be seen as the preserve of the young, rich and thrusting individuals. Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street, intended as a searing indictment of the amorality of financial markets, unwittingly was read by aspirant financiers almost as a training manual. Similarly, the emergence of new media combines during the 1990s, and novel transmission mechanisms that allowed multi-channel TV, meant that there was a profit to be turned from focusing some attention on finance and money. And finally, there was significant state pressure to produce the conditions under which financially aware consumers could come into existence, from consumer legislation to governmental action promoting private pensions and retirement savings (Clark, 2000). The result was clear: key elements of international finance (investing, trading, etc.) developed a growing audience and clientele among the general population, most apparently in the United States, where the rapid growth of mutual funds and related products, the expansion of 401(k) plans, Internet trading and generally available “real-time” (or near to real-time) information all produced a financial ambience in which it appeared that international financial transactions were properly part of middle-class everyday life.Amplifying and driving this emerging state of affairs was the concomitant growth of the financial media. This has taken four main forms. First, there was an explosion of financial publications, from newspapers and specialized magazines to various round-robin publications, including the growth on the Internet of the kinds of tipster publications which would previously have been limited to small specialist
readerships (Leyshon et al., 1998; Leyshon and Thrift, 1998). Second, and perhaps more significantly, financial reporting became a key feature component of mainstream media. This was manifest both through the growing prominence of the personal finance pages of the newspapers and the specialist financial television programs, and specialized financial television channels (such as CNNfn, CNBC and Bloomberg in the US or the (now bankrupt) Money Channel in the UK).
Economic news has become increasingly interpreted solely in terms of its impact on financial markets. A concomitant result of these changes has been that financial journalists and commentators have increasingly become players in their own right (Kurtz, 2000). Third, advertising for financial products exploded (total global spending worldwide tripled during the 1990s; Greenfield and Williams, 2001), fuelling a demand for financial products. And fourth, the supply of financial news and information has been increasingly concentrated into the hands of a very few “news, information and technology” corporations (Craig, 1999, 2001), especially Reuters and Bloomberg. These news and information-gathering corporations increasingly have moved up and down the value chain, supplying information technology and trading systems at one end (such as the famous Bloomberg terminals), financial journalism and “brand-name information” in the middle, and a series of diversified investments in such growing areas as the Internet at the top end.Thus, for the first time, international finance has become a news and entertainment commodity like any other. Through the 1990s boom and bubble, what counted as news and entertainment clearly included finance just as this began to exclude the so-called “hard facts” of the conventional channels such as the BBC, CBS and NBC. In turn, the conjunction of entertainment with finance has made finance open to exactly the same conditions as those driving the production of any other news and entertainment commodity These conditions are of five kinds.
First, the rule of the next story: stories must circulate rapidly in order to provide the daily fuel for morning shows. This means that “tipping points” (Gladwell, 2000), where stories circulate until they gain sufficient currency to change perceptions and - in this case - market sentiments, must constantly be created. Second, the rule of celebrity: money and finance are increasingly represented through personalities whose representation (which often includes ex-cathedra homilies and opinions) is itself a source of profit.
Whether financial channel anchors or symbolic analysts from investment banks, personalities like Louis Rukeyser or Maria Bartiromo (CNNfn’s “Money Honey”) do not simply represent finance, they embody it. Third, the rule of celebrity notwithstanding, finance is increasingly governed by a rule of fashion: styles of practice, personalities and products come and go. Being associated with substance is no refuge from the harsh imperatives of media demographics and related image consultants. Fourth, the rule of theatricality: money and finance have an explicitly performative character. They have to be scripted and acted out, as Tsing’s (1999) evocative account of the collapse of a Canadian gold consortium - Bre-X - powerfully demonstrates. Fifth, and last, the rule of emotion: part of the media’s appeal comes from their ability to produce and catalyze emotion. Although a critical appreciation of the role of affect inPerformingfmance 169 constructing market dynamics can be traced back to Gabriel Tarde’s (1902) tour de force and through both Kindleberger (1978) and the research on behavioral finance (for example, Thaler, 1993), as financial markets have become more mediatized so affect is playing an even greater part in the changing market “sentiment” (see Pixley, 2002).