Review: Matthew Gill on Framing Finance

Alex Preda, Framing Finance: The Boundaries of Markets and Modern Capitalism. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009, 328pp. $US 25.00 paper (978-0-226-67932-7), $US 65.00 hardcover (978-0-226-67931-0).

In the eighteenth century, Alex Preda observes, financial speculators were socially marginalized. They were thought to undermine government, to divert resources away from productive activity, and to weaken the moral order by severing consumption from work. These critiques live on, of course, but many of those who would previously have been described as speculators are now able to describe themselves as investors. Framing Finance shows how the distinction between speculation and investment developed in financial market actors’ favor during the nineteenth century, not least as a result of the increasing credibility, and then authority, of their own self-interpretations. Read more