Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City

Epilogue

148 Epilogue V ietnam’s admission to the World Trade Organization in 2007 came more than twenty years after the Vietnamese Communist Party launched Đổi Mới (Renovation). The following year, the threat of the collapse of global financial institutions triggered a crisis that originated not in Asia but in the heartland of capitalism, the United States. Unlike the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe in 1989, however, the financial crisis has not (at the time of this writing) launched a wholesale restructuring of national economies. No image equivalent to the collapse of the Berlin Wall has yet come to symbolize this crisis.1 Crisis management has focused on stabilizing and restoring credit markets and financial institutions rather than reforming and restructuring them.2 What, then, of societies where the financialization of everyday life does not run so deep? How does this translate to other economic cultures, those in which the scope and stretch of financial institutions in everyday life is shallower and more contested? Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City is an ethnographic monograph about events that took place in the years leading up to the financial crisis. It tells of monetary pluralism rather than tightly wound institutional bets, of the sensuous pleasures of cash rather than the calculations of derivatives. And it tells about the morality of money in a country that has struggled to remain independent from the two countries that have come to define the economic crisis, China and the United States. For many economists, the financial crisis is framed as a morality play of two societies—an overconsuming and indebted United States and an export-producing, foreign-reserve-hoarding China. But this scenario overlooks important dynamics within both countries, particularly the ideological privileging of home ownership in the United States and state-led growth in China. Even the chairman of the US Federal Reserve acknowledged that, in regard to those countries that pursue strong export-led growth backed by Epilogue 149 large current account surpluses and ample foreign-exchange reserves, the lessons for Asian countries are not clear.3 In an export-driven world, weakened currencies are seen as leverage to enhance productivity. The Chinese government has resisted calls to let the renmibi appreciate, but it has taken steps to create offshore markets based in Hong Kong to enhance the liquidity of the currency. The fates of the US dollar and the euro are not so certain. Confidence in the US dollar has been boosted by the sovereign debt crisis in the euro zone, which has made apparent the costs of abandoning monetary sovereignty. Ireland and Greece can no longer resolve debt problems by devaluation, as the euro has been turned into the instrument for disciplining populations who never benefited from the financial bets that triggered the crisis. These emergent possibilities reinforce the major claim of this book, namely that global monetary policies underwrite cultural politics of identity as much as they point to possible avenues for future inquiry. What I have argued is how ordinary citizens on the streets, in homes and alleyways, and across territorial borders have shaped the social imaginary of money, demonstrating why monetary politics cannot be reduced to Western models and concepts. Money must be unbundled from its particular guises that depend on specific political institutions, policies, intellectual practices, and even physical stock to support its circulation. Currencies may be recalled by state authorities, their role as a measurement of value eroded by increasingly higher-denominated bills being put into circulation, their status as a store of value overturned by political events. Considering people’s experiences with the failures of currency—the steep devaluations, the forced reforms, the unstable prices—their orientations to money’s transformative power is all the more remarkable. Whether the 2008 financial crisis will lead to “decoupling ,” a radical reordering of power among developed and developing countries , is beyond the scope of this book, but what is clear is that currencies will not lose their power to mediate the cultural politics of identity. Within money resides the magic of modernity made all the more powerful when it is revealed as mere artifice.4 Monetary Pluralism Residents of Ho Chi Minh City recognize that not all money is created equal and that its pluralism entails different obligations, risks, and opportunities. Money in its different guises—Vietnamese đồng, US dollars, gold bars, and 150 Epilogue votive offerings—mediates the cultural politics of identity in...