Grassroots populist speculators understood modern financial fictions deeply

Evidence

My argument, contrary to the “atavistic crowd” explanations of the Gilded Age, is that farmers, outcasts, and grassroots speculators deeply understood the importance of modern financial fictions. Their incipient shared speculative imagination did not seek a return to the previous status quo of either providential or actuarian risk control, but strove instead for new forms of insurance that would allow them to benefit from the (economic as well as political) possibilities arising from speculation. Most notably, the populist movement challenged the personal assumption of risk and competed for guarantors and forms of socialized risk that would allow it some access to the gains of speculative markets. Meanwhile, despite their spectacular demise, bucket shops became important levers in the formation of the dominant financial culture of the twentieth century (see Hochfelder 2006). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 205

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s finance/speculation thread and to Preda’s work on speculation as a ‘national project’ cited throughout this chapter. — connects to: Populism may itself express the public’s irrational exuberance — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 686; Imagined Communities analysis can be deployed to study financialized capitalism through speculation. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 127; Populist passions animate rather than oppose financial rationality — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 268 (+3 more)
• SEED: An essay angle: how marginalized groups historically used speculative markets as a form of proto-social-insurance — the ‘poor man’s hedge’ — challenging the moralizing narrative that speculation is a rich-person’s vice.

Broader Connections

• Populist passions animate rather than oppose financial rationality #expands (0.85) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 268
• Eastern European populists are deeper into speculative finance than their neoliberal predecessors #exemplifies (0.80) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 503
• Populists and the arch-speculator Soros share a disposition of harnessing political uncertainty for yield #expands (0.75) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 247