How to Read the Future: The Yield Curve, Affect, and Financial Prediction

Abstract

Financial prediction provokes intense affect. For bond traders, hedge fund managers, and economic planners, both statistical reasoning and affective discomfort surround professional judgments about the future. This article argues that contemporary financial knowledge is organized around the interplay of reason and affect. The history and contemporary use of the U.S. Treasury yield curve—a key economic indicator—point to this intractable problem of modern knowledge more generally. The devices that should create grounds for calculating future profits also open avenues of affect. Specifically, the reflexive character of financial devices provides fertile ground. As a forecasting tool, the yield curve's effectiveness is bound to its particular social content. Financial tools aggregate and objectify professionals' assessments about the economic future. Readers of the curve's shape must evaluate the rationality of the economic participants whose activities compose this reflexive device. Reading the financial future places affect at the center of calculation.

6 The time it takes: temporalities of planning

“…In contrast, recent discussions of neoliberal time have been much more centred on expert technologies of prediction (e.g. Lakoff ; Zaloom ), but are similarly singularly focused on one kind of temporality at a time, although Zaloom does offer an ethnography of how the technology is done, as well as how it projects over time. Somewhere between these core approaches, addressing changing regimes of everyday time, asking how anthropology deals with history, or how scientific technologies are used to cope with uncertainty, we need to make room to see the layering and folding of presents and futures that persist from modern into neoliberalizing states.…”

“…In contrast to the focus on predicting the future (e.g. Zaloom ) or anticipating potential events (Lakoff ), a closer look at both ordinary and particular planning practices demonstrates the variation and fecundity of temporal imagination and management that are found in both modern and neoliberal regimes. These have much more to tell us than of the relationship between technology and affect (cf.…”

“…These have much more to tell us than of the relationship between technology and affect (cf. Zaloom ). Contemporary forms of planning continue to envisage long‐term futures, and deal with immediate issues, but I argue that they do not evacuate the near future of intention or activity, or of potential (cf.…”

3 For labour: Ajeet's accident and the ethics of technological fixes in time

“…It does this by arguing for a return to a focus on labour as an act of mediation in both markets and places of production. Building on the analyses by Upadhyay (2009) and Zaloom (2006; of the quotidian experience of new technologies and temporal representations, it restores the significance of the sensory affects and ethics that emerge in the act of work. In particular, it will show the importance of focusing on both markets and places of production as complex timescapes that generate contingent affects and effects.…”

A doubtful hope: resource affect in a future oil economy

“…More generally, a growing number of economic anthropologists now attend to the ways affect has been implicated in the knowledge practices and productive processes of past and present capitalist societies (e.g. Richard & Rudnyckyj ; Tsing ; Yanagisako ; Zaloom ). Affect in this work is seen not as an anti‐economic response but as one force among many that give economies their specific shape, while also being shaped by them.…”