Aggregate market outcomes cannot be inferred directly from traders’ deal-making rationales.
Evidence
In focusing on markets as social forms, we necessarily exclude questions of the aggregate social and economic consequences—on exchange rates and on the wealth of nations and populations—that arise when enormous amounts of money are being traded. These questions are important, but they would require an entirely different approach—e.g., the analysis of exchange-rate movements in relation to indicators of income, spending, investments, pension levels, etc. In other words, answers to such questions do not simply emerge from traders’ rationales for making particular deals or from banks’ rationales for acting as market makers in foreign exchange. — Karin Knorr Cetina & Urs Bruegger, Global Microstructures, 19
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the micro-macro problem in economic sociology and the ethnography-of-finance literature; the methodological point parallels work like Zaloom’s on trading floors. — connects to: Observing economics used in markets does not prove it shapes them. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 88
Related
- Market conversations do not merely transmit information but perform the economic action itself (similarity 0.81)
- Fieldwork on trading floors reveals the microstructural and knowledge-embedded basis of global trading systems. (similarity 0.80)
- Observing economics used in markets does not prove it shapes them. (similarity 0.80)
Broader Connections
- Observing economics used in markets does not prove it shapes them.
#corroborates(0.85) — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 88