Central bank capitalism: Visible hands, audible voices

Central bankers can create money out of thin air; they can stop the misbehaviour of some of the most powerful institutions in the contemporary world – financial markets – in a matter of hours, if not minutes. In the era of central bank capitalism virtually every aspect of economic life has come under the sway of financial and monetary concerns. The author has focused on a particularly uncanny aspect of this regime: how central bankers endow the future with discernible features that we – the public – can reflect and act upon, animating or curtailing our propensity to produce, consume, borrow, and lend. Central bankers – rather than predicting the future – seek to create elements of a tractable future. They do this with words. They use language to sustain not merely the ideas that animate our economic future, but also the structures of feeling, the sentiments, and expectations that make them real. This article examines a series of communicative experiments that transformed the dynamics of contemporary capitalism, imparting its powerful capabilities to the visible hands and audible voices of a tiny group of government appointees – central bankers.