Talking about the crisis: Performance of forecasting in financial markets

The paper examines how discourses about the financial crisis were constructed in 2007 and the first half of 2008 in various Swiss and German banks. Based on ethnographic materials, this paper analyses the organisation of discussions and presentations about the future in financial institutions and argues that such analysis can contribute significantly to our understanding of global ignorance before and during the crisis. Forecasting discourses are rigorously structured in such a way that the production of unrealistic predictions and, thus, of fictions and illusions is more or less inevitable. Particularly in the representational mode (or at the front stage, according to Erving Goffman), the pressure imposed by the audience's expectations leads to forecasts that are rigid, formal, number-oriented and rather artificially precise. Because the convention at the front stage is to present a scientifically justified and unambiguous definition of the situation, major uncertainties and potential surprises are downplayed or largely excluded; in this way, ignorance and fictions about the future are created. It might be argued that these social enforcements are so rigid that even during the crisis only minor discursive shifts could be observed.