"In the Long Run We Are All Dead": Imaginary Time in Financial Market Narratives

Introduction

Contemporary narratives about the financial markets, from manuals to press conferences to the evening news, replay the idea of a distinct financial market temporality. This idea can be found in the explanation that "what matters" at the stock market is not the past but the future—that future developments of stocks are "priced in" the present stock market rates, or that "in the long run you can't beat the market" because it is efficiently tied to the development of the production-based economy.

The famous title quotation, taken from John Maynard Keynes (Tract, 65), is an ironic commentary on the assumption that the market beats all in the long run. It takes issue with the stereotype of long-term rational and efficient markets: "Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again" (65). Beyond irony, however, it indicates the impact of time conceptions upon the financial markets in relation to or in contrast with societal reality.

This early evidence of radical doubt over prevailing concepts of market temporality resembles a critique of informational capitalism avant la lettre. Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello have argued that capitalism in the twentieth century has appropriated various powerful arguments issued against it, most recently by the aesthetic critique of the 1960s. As a response to the then-widespread arguments that capitalized on the culturally alienating consequences of capitalist production and professional ethics, the symbolic structure of this ethics shifted towards a project-based view of one's own professional life that promoted autonomy, self-responsibility, and lifelong learning as opposed to heteronomy, dependency, and hierarchical career channels. Current varieties of neoclassical theories, which manifest themselves in "neoliberal" political and economic programs but impact also on the education of financial professionals, share three basic assumptions: the efficient market hypothesis, which is guided by the assumption that prices generated by the free play of supply and demand reliably render the value of traded commodities; the fundamental welfare hypothesis, which states that markets are the most efficient—that is, least costly—way of organizing social security; finally, the rational expectations hypothesis, which claims that all market participants will eventually share one correct set of assumptions about economic developments (Best, 370). To sum up: "If the efficient market hypothesis tells us that markets are accurate and the fundamental welfare theorem that they are good, the rational expectations hypothesis states that they are the only game in town" (371). Just as the managerial complex in contemporary capitalism, reacting to criticisms issued against it, has incorporated the changed criteria of legitimacy and success in the economy, it is as if neoclassical theorists have incorporated Keynes's critique of long-term considerations into their program, in that they rigorously abstract agency and leave the subjects, as it were, dead.

The paper at hand explores the institutional and imaginary dimension of time in professional narratives about the financial markets. Keynes noted that a long-term professional orientation on the stock market is an improbable strategy, not least because "it is the long-term investor, he who most promotes the public interest, who will in practice come in for most criticism. . . . For it is in the essence of his behaviour that he should be eccentric, unconventional and rash in the eyes of average opinion" (General Theory, 157). There seems to be a special relationship between professional orientations and the perceptions of time on the financial market. Moreover, as the work of Boltanski and Chiapello shows, one of the basic points about the cultural dimension of capitalism obviously has to do with some sort of professional ethics. Tracing back their approach to Max Weber's work on the role of Protestant asceticism for the emergence of capitalism, their point is that the "spirit" of capitalism and its ability to appropriate criticism and turn it into a resource of legitimacy resides in professional ethics. That is, it can be discerned in interpretive patterns and frames of reference held by...