A Political Anthropology of Finance: Studying The Distribution of Money in The Financial Industry As A Political Process
A Political Anthropology of Finance: Studying The Distribution of Money in The Financial Industry As A Political Process
A Political Anthropology of Finance: Studying The Distribution of Money in The Financial Industry As A Political Process
Anthropological Theory
2021, Vol. 21(1) 3–27
A political anthropology ! The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1463499620951374
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Horacio Ortiz
Universite Paris-Dauphine, PSL University, CNRS, IRISSO,
France
Institute of Anthropology, East China Normal University,
Shanghai, China
Abstract
This article proposes an analytics to study the financial industry as a global political
institution, based on its role in the production of global hierarchies, by the way it
collects, produces and distributes money worldwide. I propose to do this by combining
three analytic angles. First, I propose to situate the financial industry in a global space,
where it contributes to produce multiple social hierarchies, which connect to the
history of colonialism, the World Wars, the Cold War and its aftermath. These hier-
archies cannot be subsumed under a single logic, but must be studied as intersecting
and mutually constitutive. The second angle concerns the rules of monetary distribu-
tion applied by financial professionals, mobilizing, among others, the concepts of inves-
tor, market efficiency, risk and value, with their partly contradictory character and their
technical, moral and political meanings. These rules are institutionalized in state regu-
lation, labour and commercial contracts, giving the financial industry a certain institu-
tional cohesion worldwide. The last analytic angle then concerns the way in which
financial professionals make sense of their place in the global hierarchies they contrib-
ute to produce. They tend to use repertoires of meritocracy to connect their role in
global monetary distribution to the social elites they tend to belong to, with conflicts
that vary across the multiple forms of social identification present in the financial
industry worldwide. Combining these three analytic angles allows for mobilizing
Corresponding author:
Horacio Ortiz, 27, rue Stephenson, 75018 Paris, France.
Email: horacio.ortiz@free.fr
4 Anthropological Theory 21(1)
fieldwork done in the offices of the financial industry to develop a critical account of its
global political role.
Keywords
Finance, global, hierarchy, institutions, money, power
Introduction
The financial industry plays a fundamental role in the production of global
inequalities. By the way in which it collects, produces and distributes money world-
wide, it establishes hierarchies among states, territories, corporations, populations
and kinds of activities, putting them into competition with each other and making
them interdependent. In this process, vast parts of the world population are
deprived of resources, while others accumulate them. The financial industry can
thus be considered a political institution. It is a political social space in the sense
that in it, social hierarchies that stretch beyond it are established, reproduced,
transformed and legitimized (Balandier, 1967). And it is an institution in the
sense that it is organized by practices that reiterate relatively stable rules about
the production of social hierarchies (Abeles, 1995). This raises the question of the
connection between the everyday practices of people working in the financial
industry and the global hierarchies that result from them. These hierarchies are
multiple, so that they can hardly be subsumed under a general financial logic. The
everyday procedures of people working in a particular company and sector of the
financial industry may seem disconnected from the global effects of the industry at
large. And financial employees make sense of their professional and non-
professional lives in multifarious, often ambiguous and contradictory ways, so
that their relation to the production of global hierarchies may seem blurry. To
address these issues, this article proposes an analytics to understand together the
multiplicity of hierarchies produced worldwide by the financial industry, the
bureaucratic character of its organization and the fact that its distributive effects
result from the everyday practices that are meaningful to people working in it.
These three analytic angles build on each other by highlighting interrelated aspects
of the production of social hierarchies.
The first analytic angle concerns situating the financial industry in the produc-
tion of global hierarchies, in order to identify its political role. The financial indus-
try produces, collects and distributes money worldwide. The hierarchies it
contributes to produce must therefore be analysed in a global social space,
where all the earth’s 7.6 billion people constitute one social group. In this space,
social hierarchies are multiple. They are directly related to global histories of col-
onization, corporate expansion and the Cold War, among others, with their con-
stitutive processes of racism, sexism, appropriation and exploitation. In these
Ortiz 5
different social relations, the money managed by the financial industry is used
differently. The financial industry thus contributes to produce social hierarchies
that are partly independent from it and that shape it in return (Montagne and
Ortiz, 2013). Many analyses have shown how practices upholding ‘shareholder
value’ have transformed companies (Ezzamel et al., 2008; Ho, 2009). Others
have shown how expanded credit and new forms of financial calculation have
transformed consumption and public administration (Chiapello, 2015; Leyshon
and Thrift, 2007; Muniesa et al., 2017). But the multiple power relations organized
through the money distributed by the financial industry cannot be subsumed under
‘neoliberalism’ or ‘financialization’ if they are considered as a single logic deployed
uniformly worldwide (Van der Zwan, 2014; Venugopal, 2015). Doing so runs the
risk of occluding other social hierarchies, on which these logics, and the financial
industry, actually rest.
Instead, we can grasp analytically how the financial industry contributes to
produce a multiplicity of global hierarchies with the studies in the anthropology
and sociology of money showing that, because monetary practices vary greatly
depending on social setting, money is simultaneously constitutive of different
social hierarchies and constituted differently in each of them (Dodd, 2014;
Guyer, 2016; Maurer, 2006; Zelizer, 2009). Guyer (2004) proposes that these mul-
tiple rules of monetary practice be considered as ‘repertoires’ that are ‘per-
formed’––each performance holds the possibility to change the rules, to combine
different repertoires and create new ones. These repertoires include multiple
notions of time, space, agency, institutions and objects of exchange, according
to imaginaries that can be based on religious, gender or racial identification, or
on ideas about the legitimacy and reach of corporate or state power (see also
Peebles, 2010). To analyse the global political role of the financial industry, I
propose to focus on the multiplicity of social hierarchies the industry contributes
to produce. We can do so by looking at connections between multiple repertoires
of monetary production, collection and distribution where the financial industry
plays a role. This implies analysing how the financial relations established by
financial professionals observed in a specific office of the financial industry are
actually part of a global space of monetary distribution (Hart and Ortiz, 2014). By
focusing on the multiplicity of power relations that are both constituted by, and
constitutive of the financial industry, we can situate the critical intervention of
political anthropology at their intersections (Bear et al., 2015).
The role that the financial industry plays in the production of multiple hierar-
chies worldwide raises the question of what are the concrete practices of monetary
distribution that lead to these hierarchies. This is connected to the question of the
extent to which the global financial industry can be analysed as a distinct social
space. The second analytic angle addresses this institutional character of the finan-
cial industry. The financial industry is made of very different companies, with
multiple aims and relations and operating across various jurisdictions. But finan-
cial professionals work in a bureaucratic setting, where they apply standardized
procedures, methods and forms of knowledge. These shared monetary repertoires
6 Anthropological Theory 21(1)
concern the production, collection and distribution of money and have relative
uniformity across the industry. They are formalized in labour contracts, commer-
cial contracts and financial regulation, which make them compulsory for profes-
sionals. Miller and Rose (1992) have proposed to analyse this kind of situation
showing that the capacity to produce social hierarchies does not rest solely with
supposedly unified institutions, like the state. This capacity can also be distributed
through the replication of methods, procedures and expert forms of knowledge in
more or less connected sets of organizations (see also Escalona Victoria, 2016).
Mennicken and Miller (2012) highlight how the use of the same accounting and
financial methods across different organizations establishes a ‘territory’ of power
relations that is specific to these methods. Sassen (2012) speaks of an ‘operational
field’ to address the fact that the global power relations established by finance
concern financial techniques, but also an assemblage that includes state agencies
and other organizations beyond financial companies. My focus here is compatible
with these approaches, but it implies delimiting the object of analysis differently. I
propose to look at the distributive effects of the application of monetary reper-
toires of valuation and investment by financial professionals, whereby they pro-
duce, collect and distribute money worldwide. Of course, there may be cases where
this analytic delimitation is not practicable. These methods are also used elsewhere
outside the financial industry, and their application in this industry depends on
other institutions, such as states and the academic settings where these methods are
formalized. But the analytic angle proposed here corresponds to the kind of reg-
ularities of practice that we can observe when doing fieldwork in the financial
industry.
Miller and Rose (1992) stress that bureaucratic methods, procedures and official
bodies of knowledge have meanings that are at once technical, moral and political.
This permits limited variation, as professionals mobilize them in disconnected or
contradictory ways. In the financial industry, this implies that the main concepts in
the repertoires of valuation and investment, such as ‘investor’, ‘market’, ‘value’
and ‘risk’, must be studied as having technical, moral and political meanings. This
is fundamental to understanding both how money is distributed hierarchically, and
how the hierarchies are legitimized morally and politically (De Goede, 2005;
Langley, 2015; Ortiz, 2014a). This is obscured in Michel Callon’s study of the
performativity of economic models, i.e. their role in shaping reality, especially
when he states that, in ‘markets’ that function ‘correctly’, ‘politics’ occurs ‘outside
of markets’ (Callon, 2010: 166). This obviates the observation that the act of
defining a social relation as a ‘market’ is itself only possible as part of power
relations (Butler, 2010; Miller, 2008), leading some critics to assert that it risks
‘rational(izing) the reliance on orthodox conceptions of the economy’ (Cooper and
Konings, 2016: 2). On the contrary, considering that valuation and investment
repertoires are at once technical, moral and political is fundamental to analysing
together how these global hierarchies are actually produced and how they are
legitimized by political and regulatory discourses.
Ortiz 7
These two analytic angles consider that: 1) the political role of the financial
industry consists in the way it produces global hierarchies and 2) these hierarchies
result from the daily application of standardized rules of monetary distribution in
the financial industry’s bureaucratic organization. This raises the question of how
the people who apply these rules of monetary distribution make sense of their
distributive effects. This is the third analytic angle proposed here.
In order to directly connect the everyday experience of financial professionals to
the political role of the financial industry, I propose to focus on how they imagine
and experience themselves as part the global hierarchies they contribute to pro-
duce. This is crucial for understanding how their practices are acceptable, legiti-
mate, or at least liveable to them, so that they repeat routinely the procedures that
lead to these global hierarchies. Financial professionals, like many other employees
of bureaucracies, usually make sense of their practices at work by connecting their
professional and their non-professional lives and identities. As in other work set-
tings, relations between employees and companies are complex and employees can
have diverse emotional relationships to their work, ranging from adherence to
aversion, and including different forms of indifference. Their viewpoints may
not extend across the breadth of their professional fields and they may not fully
understand some of the procedures they follow (Hoag, 2011; Weber, 1978). Yet,
fieldwork shows that they often understand their role in producing social hierar-
chies as intimately related to the privileged place they perceive themselves occu-
pying within them (Ho, 2009). Privileged professional positions are often attained
by people who already belong to various social elite groups (Khan, 2012). For
many financial professionals, their highly paid jobs in the financial industry con-
firm at the same time their broader elite status and the legitimacy of their capacity
to influence the way money is distributed in society at large.
Many analyses have shown that the relations among employees in the financial
industry are organized around social hierarchies defined in terms of age, race,
gender, nationality, religion, class and educational background, among others.
These relations can be conflictive, just like they are outside the financial industry.
They can be contained within boundaries that do not correspond to the global
space of operations of the financial industry, but that are marked by national and
regional agendas. But in general, these conflicts do not lead employees to ques-
tioning financial industry procedures and their global distributive effects, and con-
cern instead the rights of different employees to profit from their application. This
third analytic angle thus asks how, even through conflicts among employees, the
way in which professionals understand their place in specific social hierarchies
tends to legitimize these global hierarchies and the financial industry’s role in
producing them.
These three analytic angles build on each other. The political role of the finan-
cial industry must first be set analytically in the global space of monetary distri-
bution, so that the multiplicity of social hierarchies it contributes to produce are
taken into account, instead of considering that there is a single financial logic at
play. The analysis of financial procedures of monetary distribution then allows for
8 Anthropological Theory 21(1)
seeing the concrete practices whereby these multiple global hierarchies are pro-
duced and rendered interdependent in everyday practice. And the analysis of the
meaning of global hierarchies for financial professionals then shows how their
routine practices seem legitimate to them.
Combined, these three analytical angles help clarify how a multiplicity of global
hierarchies are produced by the application of standardized procedures that are
shared across the industry and that are applied by professionals who consider that
their role in this monetary distribution is legitimate. We can then study the finan-
cial industry as a political institution, to formulate an anthropological critique of
its role in the production of global hierarchies. In the following pages I use the rich
analyses of the anthropology and sociology of finance to further develop these
three angles. To do so, I put them in dialogue with an example from fieldwork I did
in Paris in 2004 among employees working with credit derivatives in Acme, a large
global investment firm,1 before these financial contracts played a major role in the
‘financial crisis’ of 2008.
Global hierarchies
This section explores the proposition that the political role of the financial industry
can only be studied in the global space of the social hierarchies it contributes to
produce. The financial industry produces, collects and distributes money world-
wide. In this process, it allows certain activities to develop and excludes others. The
activities that access the money managed by the financial industry are redefined as
assets and must often transform following the financial industry’s requirements.
They are thus put into competition with each other and rendered interdependent.
This contributes to create global hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion, where the
financial industry is partly shaped by relations of power that occur outside of it.
This global extension of the industry is most often what gives it power in local
settings. The social hierarchies established in a specific place where we do field-
work, like Acme’s offices in Paris, are thus part of a global monetary distribution.
The financial industry makes them interdependent with other social hierarchies,
with which they are co-constituted. In order to analyse the political character of
the financial industry, we must situate fieldwork observations within this produc-
tion of multiple global hierarchies. Not doing so may reinforce the visibility of
certain hierarchies and occlude others that actually sustain them.
In early 2004, I worked for 4 months as an intern in a group of seven people.
Three fund managers, one financial analyst and three assistants (including myself)
were tasked with buying asset-backed securities (ABS), mainly produced by banks
based in the United States, with money coming from Acme’s clients, mainly banks
and insurance companies based in Europe. I assisted Juliette, the second senior
fund manager, who spent most of her time reading the documents describing each
ABS, in order to decide which ones to purchase. Juliette and her boss Marie, both
in their mid-thirties, had spent their entire careers in finance focusing mainly on
asset-backed securities. Juliette worked for a rating agency before joining Acme.
Ortiz 9
In 2004 she had been with the company more than two years and had seen her
team expand with the growing production and trade of US credit derivatives. In
order to grasp the political character of the financial industry, these observations
need to be situated within global hierarchies of monetary distribution that sustain
them. To do this, we must see how they are a segment of the global production and
distribution of money and how they are interdependent with social hierarchies
produced outside the financial industry and partly outside the geography of cir-
culation of US-issued ABS.
Besides the production of money by states, money is produced by banks. This
happens as banks issue loans that become deposits, within limits imposed by state
regulation, such as requirements that a minimum amount of money be deposited at
the central bank or held by the banks as their own capital, instead of being lent
(Galbraith, 1975; Hart, 2000). Producing ABS allowed banks to take loans off
their balance sheets and issue new loans without violating these regulations. Banks
produce ABS by ‘securitizing’ loans, usually in bundles of 10,000. The bank trans-
fers the bundle of loans to a separate entity, which issues a bond, the ABS. This
security can be purchased by a third party, like Acme, which then receives income
from the loan payments made by the bank’s borrowers. Acme’s ABS team bought
hundreds of these assets, usually in blocks of e10 million, and securitized them
again, issuing a collateralized debt obligation (CDO), which was sold to banks and
insurance companies in Europe that were Acme’s clients. Each CDO would con-
tain around 150 different ABS, for an investment of around e1.5 billion. The e1.5
billion these banks and insurance companies invested in Acme’s CDO belonged,
among others, to bank depositors and insurance policy holders and was used by
US banks to issue more mortgages. The money paid by bank borrowers, typically
US homeowners paying mortgages, supported in turn the lending and insurance
activities of European banks and insurance companies.
Thus, Juliette’s investment and valuation practices contributed to creating a
financial interdependence between millions of people across the Atlantic. They
produced social hierarchies in the United States concerning access to mortgage
loans and home ownership, and social hierarchies in Europe concerning access to
private insurance and bank accounts. Juliette’s practice of buying these ABS for
Acme’s clients contributed, in the United States, to the over-indebtedness and
dispossession of low-income people, often members of minority groups, disem-
powered by historical discrimination, who sought middle-class status through
home ownership. Their mortgage payments funded access to bank and insurance
services in Europe, supporting repertoires of middle-class consumption, but also of
life and death (through life insurance, for instance). Companies like Acme, rating
agencies and the banks and insurance companies involved in producing, buying
and selling the securities earned profits according to the terms of their contracts
with their clients and commercial partners.
In 2004, the ABS team managed e5 billion in several CDOs for its clients.
Yet, limiting our analysis to the particular social hierarchies produced with the
e5 billion, or even to ABS and CDOs in general, fails to explain their connection to
10 Anthropological Theory 21(1)
other social hierarchies that Acme, and the financial industry at large, concurrently
produced. These 5 billion euros must be analysed in the context of Acme’s total
management portfolio of e300 billion. More crucially, they have to be situated in
the role Acme and its ABS team played in the worldwide distribution of tens of
trillions of US dollars by the financial industry. Credit derivatives were only a
small fraction of this broader monetary distribution.
I use current financial figures to place my fieldwork at Acme within global
monetary relations, but proportionality holds more or less for the smaller figures
of the early 2000s. In 2004, Acme was one of the 50 largest investment companies
in the world, but a relatively small actor compared to the largest at that time,
Fidelity, which managed over US$1.5 trillion. Today, that position is held by
BlackRock, which manages above US$5 trillion. At the end of 2017, the 400 big-
gest investment management companies managed US$63.3 trillion and almost half
that amount (US$31 trillion) was managed by the 20 biggest companies
(Investment & Pensions Europe, 2018). Yet even this amount was a fraction of
the total funds managed by the industry. Total figures can be approximated by
the global capitalization2 of financial contracts, since they are produced, evaluated
and transacted mainly by professionals in the financial industry. At the end of
2017, a total of US$85.7 trillion was in listed stocks––US$32 trillion in the New
York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, US$13 trillion in the Shanghai, Shenzhen and
Hong Kong stock exchanges and US$7 trillion in Euronext and the Deutsche
B€orse (World Federation of Exchanges, 2018). In outstanding bonds, the total
figure was US$112.5 trillion––US$18 trillion issued by the US state, US$10 trillion
by the Japanese state, US$4.6 trillion by the Chinese state and US$8.5 trillion
issued by Eurozone states. There were US$11 trillion in financial derivatives out-
standing, for a notional amount of US$531.6 trillion3, mainly based on debt and
foreign exchange transactions in US dollars (Bank of International Settlements,
2018). In contrast, global gross domestic product in 2017 was US$80.6 trillion––
US$19.4 trillion for the United States, US$12.6 trillion for the Eurozone and US
$12.2 trillion for China (World Bank Group, 2018), and the aggregate budgets of
all states was US$23.7 trillion––US$6.3 trillion for the US Federal State, US$3.1
trillion for the Chinese state and US$6.1 trillion for the Eurozone states (Central
Intelligence Agency, 2018).
The production of these numbers poses interrelated epistemological and polit-
ical questions concerning their legitimate representation of any relevant social
reality, as the expert discourses accompanying them often hide conflicts and rela-
tions of power (Bear, 2014; Neiburg and Guyer, 2017). Yet, these numbers high-
light how the over 200 trillion US dollars managed by the financial industry tend to
concentrate in particular territories, activities and populations, especially in the
United States, Western Europe, Japan and, increasingly, China. These territories
are marked by inequalities, but this should not occlude the fact that accumulation
there occurs to the detriment of other regions, to which resources are denied
(Piketty, 2014; Therborn, 2013). Undernourished people in the world rose in
2017 to 821 million people, living mostly in Latin America, Africa and Asia
Ortiz 11
(FAO et al., 2018), whereas different sources estimate that US$100 billion would
suffice to eliminate malnutrition worldwide (World Bank Group, 2014; Laborde
et al./International Institute for Sustainable Development, 2016). Thus, the way in
which the financial industry produces, collects and distributes money worldwide
contributes to violent global hierarchies of accumulation and exclusion, poverty
and malnutrition.
The role of the financial industry in producing these social hierarchies is directly
related to a specific political history that it is crucial to take into account for
analysing these outcomes. Since the 1980s, regulatory transformations in the
United States (Krippner, 2011), Europe (Abdelal, 2007), Brazil (Müller, 2006),
Japan (Amyx, 2004), China (Hertz, 1998), India (Reddy, 2009) and many other
jurisdictions (Stiglitz, 2006) have embraced the fundamental ideas of neoclassical
economics. According to this theoretical framework, financial transactions occur
in efficient markets where individual investors, seeking to maximize returns, collect
information that is reflected in asset prices, which, in turn, serve as signals leading
economic actors to allocate resources in a way that is socially optimal. The legal
owners of the money are considered investors because they entrust their money to
financial professionals, and financial professionals are considered investors
because they act on behalf of their clients. This legal relation of representation
endows the financial industry with its capacity to decide where most of money
goes. Trades with financial assets conducted by non-professionals constitute a
minute proportion of the total. According to the theory of market efficiency, the
distributive effects of this arrangement are considered socially optimal (Clark,
2000; Erturk et al., 2007; Montagne, 2006). Financial regulation results from com-
plex, often contradictory processes in each state, where the neoclassical theoretical
frame is usually combined with other imaginaries in financial regulation (Guyer,
2016; Langley, 2015). Financial regulation worldwide is thus diverse, but tends to
share this frame, the application of which is nevertheless fragmented into separate
national jurisdictions (Davies and Green, 2011).
But this shared regulatory framework does not explain the concentration of
money in the United States, former colonial centres and current industrial centres,
described above. This concentration results from a specific history where the finan-
cial industry is only an element among others (Eichengreen, 1996; Helleiner, 2003;
Leyshon and Thrift, 1997). The centrality of the US dollar in global monetary
relations has been crucial for the rise of the US financial sector since WWI. Its
position strengthened after WWII, the demise of European colonial empires, the
Cold War and the developments since its end in 1990. In this process, US-based
bonds and stocks became prominent objects of investment in the United States and
worldwide. Within the United States, they play a central role funding companies
and in intergenerational relations through the pension system. This set the stage for
the rise of ‘shareholder value’ and Wall Street ‘raiders’ in the 1980s (Ho, 2009). But
these assets, and the power relations they organize, mix with other social hierarchies
elsewhere. Stock markets in China, for instance, have mainly contributed to estab-
lishing links among middle-class savings, state-owned enterprises and central
12 Anthropological Theory 21(1)
with the moral and political imaginaries of financial regulation that uphold the
financial industry’s global role. In most valuation and investment procedures, the
whole world is perceived as a single ‘efficient market’ where ‘investors’ meet, and
where they determine the ‘value’ of social activities in a ‘socially optimal’ way. Not
only does this reproduce and legitimize the social hierarchies described above, it
reinforces the supposition that the financial industry is the best, most legitimate
institution to manage them. In what follows, I will highlight the technical, moral
and political character of these rules in general, and describe a conflict and an
organizational shift concerning their application that I had the opportunity to
observe at Acme.
The ABS team was part of the Structured Department, which was directed by
Nicole, in her late forties, who had spent most of her career working with financial
derivatives. During my observations, Nicole replaced Fernand, who specialized in
stocks, as Director of the Allocation Department. Now in the company’s top
operating position, Nicole oversaw the worldwide allocation of the e300 billion
Acme managed for its clients. In her first speech in this new position, she declared
that Acme’s allocation would thereafter expand the use of derivatives to reflect
their growing place in the financial industry at large.
But Nicole and those who supported the expansion of financial derivatives in
Acme had actually little leeway to implement this project. As in all major invest-
ment firms, allocating Acme’s funds had to follow a strict set of procedures orga-
nized around Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) and the idea that the world must be
considered as a single efficient market. Institutionalized after World War II, MPT
holds that market efficiency prevents a single investor from ‘beating the market’ by
finding more information than current prices already reflect. Prices, like the infor-
mation they supposedly reflect, are considered to move ‘randomly’, according to
the probabilistic sense of the term. In that case, by mathematical construction, the
standard deviation of the price of a single asset, usually called ‘volatility’, is higher
than the standard deviation for a bundle of assets. Therefore, investors should
maximize diversification to reduce volatility, ‘buying and holding’ all available
assets—that is, the ‘whole market’. This combines in partly contradictory ways
the liberal idea that free markets best represent value because they reflect the
independent opinions of equal participants, and the idea that prices obey the
laws of probability (De Goede, 2005; MacKenzie, 2006; Maurer, 2002; Muniesa,
2007). In practice, MPT is generally used to try to ‘beat the market’ by tweaking an
investment portfolio’s replication of the ‘whole market’, giving more weight to
assets that are supposed to perform better, and less weight to those that are sup-
posed to do worse. This method, generally known as the ‘classic’ investment
approach, is used by the majority of companies and fund managers, and implies
contradictory assertions that markets are efficient (otherwise, it makes no sense to
apply MPT and buy the ‘whole market’) and that they are not (otherwise, it makes
no sense to try to ‘beat’ them). Calculations of what constitutes the ‘market’ and
how to ‘beat’ it by a small margin can lead to slightly different forms of invest-
ment. But applying this method overall results in a distribution of money that
Ortiz 15
tends to reproduce the global hierarchy of financial assets, which tends to be rep-
licated in investment portfolios. In the process, this hierarchy is legitimized as a
socially optimal allocation of resources produced by market efficiency.
Concrete application of this valuation and investment repertoire is organized in
complex relations within companies and professions. In Acme, it was used in the
Allocation Department and in most investment portfolios managed by individual
fund managers or teams, like the ABS team. A team of statisticians of the
Allocation Department used it to assess worldwide financial assets. Then, it pro-
vided guidelines on allocating funds among departments, sub-departments and
teams, each of which was defined according to the type of asset it managed,
such as Equity, Fixed Income, Emerging Markets, etc. Smaller investment com-
panies usually perform similar analyses for fewer categories of financial assets.
Replicating––with several twists––the proportion of available global assets, two-
thirds of Acme’s clients’ e300 billion went into equities and bonds issued in rich
countries and rated as ‘investment grade’—that is, above the BBB rating issued by
rating agencies. Less than 10% went to ‘emerging markets’ and assets deemed
‘below investment grade’, and the rest went to other types of assets produced in
rich countries. Anything else was excluded as not being part of the ‘investment
universe’. Fund managers’ salaries and bonuses depend, in part, on the amount of
money they manage, the idea being that larger portfolios reflect greater client trust
due to good performance. A former statistician in the Allocation Department
explained that department heads, investment teams and individual fund managers
would regularly demand that the assets they specialized in receive a bigger pro-
portion of the total allocation. This tension appeared in general relations between
employees at all levels.
In addition, MPT methodology was a major guideline at Acme for most port-
folios managed by individuals or teams. The ABS team applied it by diversifying
investment to include 150 ABS in each CDO. Juliette explained, the insurance
companies and banks required its application for investing their money because
it was the standard practice in the industry for any type of asset. She also used
MPT to justify her expectations after Nicole rose to direct the Allocation
Department: ‘For us, I hope, [the change] should be positive, it should foster
some ideas, say, that instead of having three percent of ABS in [Acme’s total]
portfolio, maybe the optimal allocation, we should work on it, but we made our
own calculations and reached 15–20 percent’. Using the term ‘optimal allocation’
and the mathematical calculations formalized in MPT, Juliette could justify her
demand for an increase in funds by mobilizing not only the technical aspects of the
theory, but by invoking the supposed political role of market efficiency in a socially
optimal allocation of resources.
The notion of market efficiency, and the idea that companies like Acme and
employees like Juliette act like maximizing investors, are organized around notions
of ‘risk’ and ‘value’ used to establish and legitimize the ranking of activities within
the supposedly efficient world market. When I was hired, ABS team members told
me that they needed to change their investment strategy. Up to that time, they had
16 Anthropological Theory 21(1)
bought the ‘safest’ types of ABS, which paid low interest rates. Those rates were
decreasing, reducing the fees Acme and its partner companies could deduct from
the income they paid their clients. The ‘solution’ was to invest in ‘riskier’ assets
paying higher interest rates.
The interest rate paid by an ABS is defined as a ‘risk-premium’ relative to the
interest rate banks use when they lend to each other, the Libor.4 This interbank
rate is closely connected to the interest rates determined by central banks, in par-
ticular, the Federal Reserve for the US dollar. This notion of ‘risk’ has multiple
definitions (De Goede, 2005; Langley, 2015; Pradier, 2006). It partly refers to the
possibility of losing the money invested. Mobilizing the idea that the strongest
states can raise taxes to prioritize their lenders over other members of the polity,
United States sovereign bonds, those of some rich European states and a few
others are considered ‘risk-free’ because they are not expected to default.
Activities deemed ‘riskier’ than ‘risk-free’ must pay a ‘risk-premium’: those that
don’t are simply excluded from the ‘investment universe’. But the notion of ‘risk’ is
also defined statistically as the standard deviation of past returns and is then often
called ‘volatility’. The higher the ‘volatility’, the higher the ‘risk-premium’ the
investor should demand. The ‘risk-free rate of return’ is central to MPT and to
most valuation and investment formulas. This concept plays a crucial role in
establishing the hierarchy of financial values, including or excluding activities
according to whether they appear as committed to prioritizing financial creditors
over other participants, like workers, consumers, citizens or the environment.
Partly expressed and institutionalized by rating agencies, this hierarchy constitutes
the technical, moral and political justification for the exclusion of the most impov-
erished part of the global population from money distributed by the financial
industry (Boy, 2015; Fourcade, 2017; Ortiz, 2014b; Sinclair, 2005).
Thus, defining ABS and CDOs in terms of ‘risk’ and ‘risk-premium’ situated
them within the global hierarchies of the financial industry’s monetary distribu-
tion. In 2004, top-rated ABS, based on the mortgages of US low-income house-
holds, were considered almost equal to the ‘risk-free’ assets described above, with a
‘risk-premium’ of 0.1%.5 Moving to lower-rated ABS in order to obtain a higher
risk premium, as Acme’s ABS team intended to do, further integrated the US-
based low-income population in the repertoires and the monetary distribution of
the financial industry, while simultaneously excluding others, considered outside
the ‘investment universe’.
While all ABS team members considered this change necessary, they held
opposed opinions about it. These positions were partly organized around the
moral and political meanings of notions of financial value, used to define financial
assets. The new technique implied giving different weight to three partly interde-
pendent definitions of ‘value’: ‘fundamental’, ‘relative’ and ‘speculative’. An asset’s
so-called ‘fundamental’, ‘intrinsic’ or ‘true’ value, is defined by the future monetary
income obtained by the owner of the money invested in it, such as dividends or
interest. In the case of ABS, it is assessed by looking at the bank loans composing
the ABS to evaluate whether, or how many, borrowers could default. So-called
Ortiz 17
themselves, which have remained central in the way the financial industry produces
and legitimizes global hierarchies (Ortiz, 2012).
The repertoires of valuation and investment described in this section are used
widely in the financial industry. Their application is central for how the financial
industry distributes money worldwide, producing and making interdependent mul-
tiple global hierarchies. These repertoires contribute to legitimizing these hierar-
chies, describing them as the optimal allocation of resources resulting from ‘market
efficiency’. Their application reproduces the centrality of states that concentrated
power in the colonial period, the World Wars, the Cold War and after that, and
excludes the most impoverished parts of world population, who, assessed in terms
of ‘value’ and ‘risk’, are considered unworthy of belonging in the ‘investment
universe’. Shared across the financial industry, these repertoires give this industry
its cohesiveness as global political institution. This not only does not prevent but
actually sustains a multiplicity of monetary repertoires outside the financial indus-
try, which contribute to shape the industry in return. These global hierarchies are
sustained by financial professionals’ everyday repetitive application of valuation
and investment repertoires. In order to understand how this repetition is possible,
it is necessary to analyse how these professionals make sense of the place they
occupy in the social hierarchies they contribute to produce. That is the third ana-
lytic angle, developed in the following section.
companies and professional specializations, but also when the media or political
discourses speak of a financial ‘crisis’. Within the vast variety of examples analysed
in the sociology and the anthropology of finance, we can highlight important
regularities in this respect. One regularity concerns how employees feel that, due
to their mastery of expert knowledge, they have the right to be the ones applying
procedures legitimized along political repertoires of ‘market efficiency’. Another
concerns how they perceive themselves to be part of the social hierarchies they
contribute to produce in terms of various social identities that do not relate directly
to financial practice, such as gender, age, race, religion and nationality.
Ho (2009) has shown how employees tend to justify their role in the production
of social hierarchies with the idea that they are the smartest component of society.
They often offer as proof the elite education that tends to be a requirement for
occupying the best-paid, so-called ‘front-office’ positions. Godechot (2016) ana-
lysed, in turn, how employees claim to merit the high salaries and bonuses they
receive by alleging ownership of sources of revenue in the financial industry, such as
relations with clients and mastery of valuation and investment methods. As in other
social settings, the narrative of meritocracy tends to naturalize as personal achieve-
ments what are actually advantages based on broader social hierarchies, such as the
monetary and educational resources which tend to determine access to elite educa-
tion and the financial industry’s highly remunerative jobs (Khan, 2012). This was
observable in the ABS team. In 2004, Marie and Juliette received combined yearly
salaries and bonuses of, respectively e400,000 and e300,000. They had both studied
in the French grandes ecoles, elite institutions similar to the Ivy League in the
United States. They told me several times that they considered themselves to be
among the most qualified experts in credit derivatives in France. Juliette thus legit-
imized her income to me in terms of the importance of the work she performed for
her company and as a reflection of her own trajectory: ‘what is valued with remu-
neration? It values the work you have done, and also your value, that is the value of,
hm. . ., in terms of experience, as an individual’. My internship was certainly facil-
itated by my degree from a grande ecole, and my connection to the team’s financial
analyst through an acquaintance from another grande ecole.
This generally elitist self-identification of financial employees is partly organized
through conflicts that concern other forms of social hierarchy, such as gender and
racial identity. Marie explained that she had to work more than men to hope being
treated as equal to them, and this demand led her to reach exhaustion as head of
the ABS team. Juliette, on the other hand, asserted that she had deflected those
demands when signing her labour contract and negotiated limits to the extra work
hours she was willing to accept. Similar tensions and more abusive forms of gender
discrimination (which are not exclusive to the financial industry) have been
described in more detail by Fisher (2012), Ho (2009), Roth (2006), Salzinger
(2016) and Zaloom (2006). In the ABS team, Fatima, whose parents had moved
to France from Northern Africa, was the lowest-paid assistant. She was eventually
side-lined and looked for a job elsewhere, confident she would obtain it due to her
training in finance in a good university. In an interview with me, she adamantly
20 Anthropological Theory 21(1)
declared that her marginalization in the team was not due to racial discrimination,
but she considered racial discrimination pervasive in the industry. Proof could be
seen, she said, in the overwhelming presence of people of Northern African descent
in low-paid jobs in the middle and back offices of the financial industry, a descrip-
tion echoing what Ho (2009) showed for Wall Street.
These examples show how social discrimination can lead employees to demand
inclusion in the rewards of the financial industry’s production of global hierarchies,
rather than question the legitimacy of these hierarchies. Marie and Juliette did not
question the legitimacy of the financial industry, and Fatima explained that racial
discrimination only reinforced her resolve to realize her goal of becoming a fund
manager. Fisher (2012) shows how female employees who organize against gender
discrimination in the financial industry only aim for gender equality within the
industry, without regard for global hierarchies that are produced by the industry
and reproduce gender discrimination (Young et al., 2011). Thus, conflicts and
hierarchies among financial professionals tend to reinforce the legitimacy of
global hierarchies arising from the financial industry’s repertoires of valuation
and investment. For these employees, the legitimacy of the distributive effects of
the application of valuation and investment procedures was not only based on the
idea of market efficiency. This legitimacy came also from the idea that they were
the people entitled to apply these procedures due to personal merits, which often
reflected their elite backgrounds.
While Marie, Juliette and Fatima did not challenge the repertoires they applied,
some social identifications may influence the way employees apply these reper-
toires. Ailon (2019) shows how trading instructors who work with lay traders in
Israel and identify as Jewish Israeli make sense of the global dominance of US
financial markets by comparing them to their own national identity. Pitluck (2014)
shows how employees of small financial firms in Malaysia mobilize different invest-
ment strategies depending on whether they perceive their counterpart as a
Malaysian or a foreigner. In these two cases, contested definitions of national
identity, and the right to claim it, inform the understanding of the world as an
efficient market. In turn, national identities are redefined, and their hierarchies
transformed, by the place they occupy in global financial relations. In both
cases, assessment of nationality becomes a variable that employees take into
account when applying the repertoires of valuation and investment.
In the cases described by Ailon and Pitluck, the repertoires of valuation and
investment, described in the previous section, are not modified. Chong (2018)
explores a situation in which this is somewhat different. She conducted fieldwork
in Northern China in Systeo, a global consulting firm that restructured its client’s
organizations by applying repertoires of ‘shareholder value’. These repertoires
were also deployed internally at Systeo. Chong shows that, in everyday practice,
employees co-constitute the repertoires of shareholder value with repertoires of
cosmopolitanism, Chinese techno-nationalism, upper-class aspirations and cultur-
alist distinctions between China and the West, in multiple, contradictory and often
unstable ways. When employees worked to restructure Chinese state-owned
Ortiz 21
Conclusion
In this article, I have proposed to consider the financial industry as a global polit-
ical institution, with an analytics that can be operationalized when we do fieldwork
in this social space. This implies, on the one hand, situating the financial relations
we observe in fieldwork within global financial relations that sustain them. The
political character of the financial industry is established in this global space, where
it contributes to making a multiplicity of hierarchies interdependent and co-
22 Anthropological Theory 21(1)
Acknowledgements
Earlier drafts of this article benefited from close reading and comments by Benjamin Braun,
Marceau Chenault, Dannah Denis, Ding Mei, Marion Fourcade, Isabelle Guerin, Teresa
Kuan, Paul Lagneau-Ymonet, Benjamin Lemoine, Susana Narotzky, Federico Neiburg,
Fareen Parvez, Sarah Quinn, Cheryl Meiting Schmitz, Federico Sor, Nathan Sperber,
Ortiz 23
Chloe Thurston and Zhu Jianfeng. My conversations over many years with Keith Hart,
Sabine Montagne and Fabian Muniesa have shaped the main ideas of this article in more
ways than I can acknowledge here. I thank the two anonymous reviewers of the journal for
their useful comments, Karen Alexander for her tremendous help with copyediting, and
Julia Eckert for her constant support and very helpful critiques and suggestions. All errors
are of course mine. This article was partly written while I was a member (2019–2020) of the
School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication
of this article.
ORCID iD
Horacio Ortiz https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7751-2854
Notes
1. Ortiz, 2014a. In agreement with the people I observed, and to protect their anonymity, all
names are false.
2. Capitalization is the product of the number of assets multiplied by their price.
3. These derivatives contracts are usually a commitment to exchange a notional amount in
the future, which is much higher than the price of the contract itself. But, usually, this
nominal amount is not exchanged, because different contracts cancel each other out
before the commitment must be fulfilled.
4. London Interbank Offered Rate.
5. That is, if the Libor was 3.4%, the ABS paid 3.5%.
6. There are other important instances of this kind of process, not addressed here for lack of
space. One is the increasing use of algorithms in the financial industry (cf. Lange et al.,
2016). Another is Islamic finance (cf. Rudnyckyj, 2019).
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