Post-2008 economists grew alarmed that speculation now powered populist politics

Evidence

In the days and years after the 2008 global financial crisis, a range of Nobel laureate economists and central bankers grew increasingly concerned with a strange re-alignment between markets and politics. Stretching beyond the realm of secondary markets, speculation was also coming to be what made a new type of populist politics tick. Akerlof and Shiller (2010) wrote, in their acclaimed Animal Spirits, that post-2008 recovery had been inhibited by two key factors: the future’s rising uncertainty and the public’s anger. Shiller (2015), in his earlier best-selling Irrational Exuberance, had singled out the public’s irrationality as the cause of speculative bubbles and thus a key threat to healthy economies. Alan Greenspan, who first coined the term irrational exuberance in the 1990s, now appeared further alarmed by “irrational populism” at the ten-year anniversary of the 2008 crisis. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 64

Categorization

• XREF: Greenspan’s pivot from ‘irrational exuberance’ to ‘irrational populism’ connects to how the reader’s own thesis traces speculative logic migrating from trading floors into electoral politics.
• SEED: The trajectory from ‘irrational exuberance’ (1990s) to ‘irrational populism’ (2018) as a naming history of elite anxiety could anchor a short essay on how authorities relabel speculation as each new domain is financialized.