Imaginaries of “investors”, “markets” and “value” in the distribution of money by the financial industry: a case study about credit derivatives

Abstract

This text is based on participant observation research as an assistant financial analyst in a multinational asset management company based in France in 2004. The purchase of credit derivatives, based on US mortgages, by the employees of this French multinational on behalf of their clients situated around the world, integrated thousands of people in a series of financial interdependencies, the hierarchies and violence of which were managed by other employees like those observed in the fieldwork. The text hows that the distribution of the money through these practices must be understood as the result of organizational logics within the company and within the commercial network of which the company is part. These professional practices are coordinated globally, from one company to another, and from one jurisdiction to another, through shared imaginaries according to which monetary gains are “value creation” that results from the encounter of “investors” in “efficient markets”. These concepts do not only articulate political discourses that were used to justify regulatory changes in the financial industry in the last thirty years, in the US, Europe and many other jurisdictions, but they are also present in the details of the definition of financial formulas, in the methodologies and in the organization of financial companies. For these reasons, professionals also mobilize these discourses to make sense of and to justify their everyday practice. The text shows the difference there is between these professional and bureaucratic practices and the theoretical meanings of the concepts that are used to justify them. In this way, the text contributes to a critique of the regulations and of the organization of the distribution of money by the financial industry, in the global space of its operations.