Diagnosing and Explaining the Global Financial Crisis: Central Banks, Epistemic Authority, and Sense Making

摘要

This article explores a key facet of the ideational dynamic underlying the politics of the global financial crisis, examining the interpretative and communicative practices through which the two most powerful central banks in the world—the Fed and the ECB—made sense of the events. Drawing on a constructivist neoinstitutional perspective, the study traces and analyzes the diagnoses and causal accounts of the global financial crisis formulated and voiced by these two actors, mapping and examining their evolution from the beginning of the events in the American subprime market in mid-2007 through the peak of the crisis in global financial markets in mid-2009. The analysis assesses the extent to which the two central banks diagnosed and explained the crisis in ways that challenged dominant notions and conceptual assumptions regarding the economic field, particularly the financial realm, or rather in ways that served to ratify them. While in the first stages of the crisis the diagnoses and causal accounts tended to ratify dominant notions and understandings of the financial field, they later evolved as involving a partial, but still significant, reassessment of established truths. These coherent and detailed sense-making plots touched upon some of the most basic attributes of global financial capitalism, carrying with them the potential for helping to open up the political space for a reevaluation of some of its ideational underpinnings.