Performing the Sub-Prime Crisis: Trauma and the Financial Event

International Political Sociology

Volumn 6, Issue 1, 2012, Pages 4-20

  Brassett, James ^a   Clarke, Chris ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84858306107     PISSN: 17495679     EISSN: 17495687     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-5687.2012.00148.x     Document Type: Article

References (68)

1. Aitken, Rob. (2005) "A Direct Personal Stake": Cultural Economy, Mass Investment and the New York Stock Exchange. Review of International Political Economy 12 (2): 334-363.
2. Austin, John Langshaw. (1975) How To Do Things With Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955, 2nd edn, edited by J. O. Urmson, and Marina Sbisà Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
3. BBC News. (2007a) Top US Lender in Chapter 11 Move. BBC News website, April 2. (Accessed August 8, 2011.)
4. BBC News. (2007b) Effort to Ease US Mortgage Woes. BBC News website, April 17., (Accessed August 8, 2011.)
5. BBC News (2007c) Northern Rock Customers Air their Views. BBC News website, September 17. (Accessed August 8, 2011.)
6. BBC News. (2008a) Timeline: Sub-Prime Losses. BBC News website, May 19. (Accessed August 8, 2011.)
7. BBC News. (2008b) UK Banking Bosses "Should Resign." BBC News website, October 12. (Accessed August 8, 2011.)
8. BBC News. (2008c) Hit by the Crunch in SY. BBC News website, July 17. (Accessed August 8, 2011.)
9. Brassett, James. (2010) Cosmopolitanism and Global Financial Reform: A Pragmatic Approach to the Tobin Tax. Oxford: Routledge.
10. Brassett, James, and Nick Vaughan-Williams (2012) Crisis Is Governance: Sub-Prime, the Traumatic Event and Bare Life. Global Society, 26 (1): 17-40.
11. Broad, Mark. (2008) I Remember the Wall Street Crash, BBC News website, October 6. Available at (Accessed January 1, 2012.)
12. Brown, Gordon. (2008) Speech to the Lord Mayor's Banquet, November 10 Transcript: (Accessed May 31, 2010.)
13. Butler, Judith. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limitations of 'Sex'. London: Routledge.
14. Butler, Judith. (2006) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
15. Callon, Michel. (1998) Introduction: The Embeddedness of Economic Markets in Economics. In The Laws of the Markets, edited by Michel Callon Oxford: Blackwell.
16. Callon, Michel, and Fabian Muniesa (2005) Economic Markets as Calculative Collective Devices. Organization Studies 26 (8): 1229-1250.
17. Clark, Gordon L., Nigel Thrift, and Adam Tickell (2004) Performing Finance: The Industry, the Media and its Image. Review of International Political Economy 11 (2): 289-310.
18. De Goede, Marieke. (2003) Beyond Economism in International Political Economy. Review of International Studies 29 (1): 79-97.
19. De Goede, Marieke. (2005) Virtue, Fortune, and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
20. Denman, Stuart. (2008) Does Capitalism Still Work? From the Web Team, September 17. (Accessed August 11, 2011.)
21. Engdahl, William F. (2008) Financial Tsunami: The End of the World as We Knew It. The Market Oracle, September 30. (Accessed August 11, 2011.)
22. Fassin, Didier. (2008) The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony: Subjectification through Trauma in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Cultural Anthropology 23 (3): 531-558.
23. Fassin, Didier, and Richard Rechtman (2009) The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
24. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. (2011) The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report: Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office.
25. Financial Times. (2009) The Future of Capitalism. Editorial Series (Accessed August 11, 2011.)
26. Furedi, Frank. (2004) Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age. London: Routledge.
27. Galbraith, John Kenneth. (2009) The Great Crash 1929: The Classic Account of Financial Disaster. London: Penguin.
28. Haldane, Andrew. (2011) Speech: Risk Off. Bank of England, August 18. (Accessed August 30, 2011.)
29. Hardie, Iain, and Donald Mackenzie (2007) Constructing the Market Frame: Distributed Cognition and Distributed Framing in Financial Markets. New Political Economy 12 (3): 389-403.
30. Holmes, Christopher. (2009) Seeking Alpha or Creating Beta? Charting the Rise of Hedge Fund-Based Financial Ecosystems New Political Economy 14 (4): 431-450.
31. Howell, Alison. (2011) Madness in International Relations: Psychology, Security and the Global Governance of Mental Health. London: Routledge.
32. Langley, Paul. (2006) The Making of Investor Subjects in Anglo-American Pensions. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24 (6): 919-934.
33. Langley, Paul. (2008a) Sub-prime Mortgage Lending: A Cultural Economy. Economy and Society 37 (4): 469-494.
34. Langley, Paul. (2008b) The Everyday Life of Global Finance: Saving and Borrowing in Anglo-America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
35. Langley, Paul. (2010) The Performance of Liquidity in the Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis. New Political Economy 15 (1): 71-89.
36. Legrain, Philippe. (2008) Taking Stock. The Guardian, October 7. (Accessed August 11, 2011.)
37. Lloyd, Moya. (1999) Performativity, Parody, Politics. Theory, Culture & Society 16 (2): 195-213.
38. Loxley, James. (2007) Performativity. London: Routledge.
39. Mackenzie, Donald. (2005) Opening the Black Boxes of Global Finance. Review of International Political Economy 12 (4): 555-576.
40. Mackenzie, Donald. (2006) An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
41. Mackenzie, Donald. (2007) Is Economics Performative? Option Theory and the Construction of Derivatives Markets. In Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics, edited by MacKenzie Donald, Fabian Muniesa, and Lucia Siu Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
42. Mason, Paul. (2008) This is an Economic Krakatoa. Idle Scrawl, October 15. (Accessed August 11, 2011.)
43. Mason, Paul. (2009) Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed. London: Verso.
44. Millo, Yuval, and Donald Mackenzie (2009) The Usefulness of Inaccurate Models: Towards an Understanding of the Emergence of Financial Risk Management. Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (5): 638-653.
45. Montgomerie, Johnna. (2008) Spectre of the Subprime Borrower: Beyond a Credit Score Perspective. CRESC Working Paper Series 58: 1-21.
46. O'malley, Pat. (2010) Resilient Subjects, Uncertainty, Warfare and Liberalism. Economy and Society 39 (4): 488-509.
47. Paulson, Henry. (2008) CNBC's Erin Burnett Interviews U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. CNBC Television Interview, November 17. Transcript: (Accessed August 11, 2011.)
48. Peston, Robert. (2008a) Who Runs Britain? London: Hodder.
49. Peston, Robert. (2008b) The American Way to Fail. Peston's Picks, September 19. (Accessed August 11, 2011.)
50. Pupavac, Vanessa. (2001) Therapeutic Governance: Psycho-social Intervention and Trauma Risk Management. Disasters 25 (4): 358-372.
51. Rawnsley, Andrew. (2010) The Weekend that Gordon Brown Saved the Banks from the Abyss. The Observer, February 21. (Accessed August 11, 2011.)
52. Reuben, Anthony (2008) What Would Financial Armageddon Look Like? BBC News website, September 23. Available at (Accessed October 1, 2011.)
53. Rorty, Richard. (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
54. Royal College of Psychiatrists. (2011) Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. (Accessed August 11, 2011.)
55. Shiller, Robert. (2008a) The Subprime Solution: How Today's Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about It. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
56. Shiller, Robert. (2008b) The Scars of Losing a Home, The New York Times, May 18. (Accessed August 11, 2011)
57. Sinclair, Timothy. (2010) Round Up the Usual Suspects: Blame and the Subprime Crisis. New Political Economy 15 (1): 91-107.
58. Skinner, Quentin. (1969) Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas. History and Theory 8 (1): 3-53.
59. Spary, Carole. (2010) Disrupting Rituals of Debate in the Indian Parliament. The Journal of Legislative Studies 16 (3): 338-351.
60. UN (2009) Report of the Commission of Experts of the President of the United Nations General Assembly on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System. (Accessed August 11, 2011.)
61. Watson, Matthew. (2007) The Political Economy of International Capital Mobility. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
62. Watson, Matthew. (2009a) Investigating the Potentially Contradictory Microfoundations of Financialization. Economy and Society 38 (2): 255-277.
63. Watson, Matthew. (2009b) Headlong into the Polanyian Dilemma: The Impact of Middle-Class Moral Panic on the British Government's Response to the Sub-prime Crisis. British Journal of Politics and International Relations 11 (3): 422-437.
64. Wharton Finance. (2009) Hope, Greed and Fear: The Psychology behind the Financial Crisis. (Accessed August 11, 2011.)
65. Widmaier, Wesley W. (2010) Emotions Before Paradigms: Elite Anxiety and Populist Resentment From the Asian Crisis to the Subprime Crisis. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39 (1): 127-144.
66. Woods, Ngaire. (2009) Analysis: Financial Tsunami. BBC Radio Documentary, March 19. Transcript: (Accessed August 11, 2011.)
67. Young, Allan. (1997) The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
68. Zarowsky, Christina. (2004) Writing Trauma: Emotion, Ethnography, and the Politics of Suffering Among Somali Returnees in Ethiopia. Culture, Medicine and Society 28 (2): 189-209.