Chapter 2 - The (In)Visible Worlds of the Economy

Summary

A One-Hour Survey: Getting a Glimpse of Financescapes in Crisis

In his seminal Banal Nationalism, Michael Billig (1995: 110–127) reveals the ubiquitous, if largely unnoticed, discursive “f lagging” of national identifications through what he terms an “illustrative day survey.” Sampling British national newspapers on the relatively “ordinary” day that was June 28, 1993, Billig demonstrates how inescapable the distinctly national framing of headline news, political commentaries, sports reporting, weather forecasts and readerships is across the press, and how such daily “homeland-making” is an integral part of the routine reproduction of the institutions of the nation-state and of most of its citizens’ widely unquestioned identification with them. Billig's argument continues to resonate in, and indeed depicts, some of the ideological conditions of possibility for features of glocalization such as nationalist counterreactions against global f lows and interdependencies. Billig's day survey also poses more general, methodological questions as to how, twenty-five years on, other workings of glocalization and globalization may be captured. For that, it stands to reason that we may need to look to some of today's media with distinctly transnational orientations, international reach, and with a particular focus. Put differently, where are some of the processes and f lows underpinning our glocalizing world encountered?

Reappropriating Billig's discursive-qualitative “survey” approach for different ends, we may, for example, wonder what satellite and cable channels exclusively dedicated to (global) financial markets, flows and investors depict and how. This is what I did, and recorded, in a shorter time-window, namely between 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. (GMT) on April 20, 2020. During this hour, as European markets reflected a difficult morning and the stock exchange in New York was getting ready to start its day, Bloomberg ran the following information recorded by the present author:

The rapidly changing numbers reported from the FTSE MIB, the DAX, the IBEX 35, the EURO STOXX 50, the CAC 40 and the FTSE 100 flicker across the bottom of my television screen. This alternates with current exchange rates—GBP/USD, GBP/EUR, EUR/USD—and their similarly rapid changes, which are interspersed by graphs depicting how those currency exchange rates have fluctuated over recent days. I realize that all this is on loop, constantly changing rates and figures and all: I am next offered the commodity indexes for gold, silver, copper, platinum, zinc, nickel, lead, wheat, corn, sugar, coffee, cocoa, soy beans, natural gas and ICE Brent, accompanied by indications of their recent changes, positive or negative.