Abstract
One of the major causes of the 2007 global economic crisis was the weak perception of the real risk of it actually occuring. This was due to a ‘financial optimism’ that created the illusion of a sustainable and never-ending prosperity. ‘Liquid markets’ boost growth, but they also prepare the ground for crisis. From where does this short-circuit arise? According to Keynes, it arises from a tacit decision about the role of time in the formation of expectations. This decision shifts the ‘precariousness of the basis of knowledge’ from the facts that happen in time to the precariousness of a ‘convention’, that is the convention that leads financial calculations and expectations. This tacit move from to a real precariousness to an ideological-theoretical one deserves to be made explicit and to be investigated.
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Notes
- 1.
The relevance of this question was clear to Bill Maurer. See Maurer (2002).
- 2.
J.S. Mill expresses this view on money’s neutrality in very open terms, as we may see from this quotation of Mill by Keynes himself in the General Theory: ‘What constitutes the means of payment for commodities is simply commodities. Each person’s means of paying for the productions of other people consist of those which he himself possesses. All sellers are inevitably, and by the meaning of the word, buyers.’ Quoted in (Keynes 1973, 18).
- 3.
My translation.
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Amato, M. (2017). From One Precariousness to Another: The Ideological Role of Financial Calculation in the Outbreak and Perpetuation of the Crisis—Preliminary Considerations Based on Chapter 12 of the General Theory . In: Magatti, M. (eds) The Crisis Conundrum. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47864-7_4
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