Paper short abstract:

Inflation and deflation are integral to the global monetary regime by which the value of money is tethered to expectations, the bewildering realms of anticipation, expectancy, and planning that impel or impede economic action. This paper examines how inflation can be examined ethnographically.

Paper long abstract:

Inflation and deflation are anticipatory (Keynes 1936). Central banks manage the global monetary regime through a series of protocols which go by the unassuming name of ‘inflation targeting’ (Bernanke et al 1999). Built into this framework are a series of communicative experiments by which the value of money is tethered to the ephemera of expectations, the bewildering realms of anticipation, expectancy, and planning that impel or impede economic action. To understand the operation of expectations requires translating macroeconomics into an anthropological idiom revealing the role of a self-organizing public—an agentive public—whose members are not merely served by policy; they enact it (Holmes 2023).

Pursuing a technical agenda initially predicated on the behavior of abstract macroeconomic aggregates—wages, employment, prices, and output—central bankers revealed a communicative field populated by vast networks of reflexive subjects—that is you and I—whose thoughts, feelings, and actions can be made intelligible ethnographically.

Inflation targeting relies on persuasion, the ability of central bankers to craft communications—based on multiple projections of economic activity and forecasts of price changes—capable of shaping expectations and thereby animating or curtailing the propensities of individuals, households, and firms to produce, consume, borrow, and lend (Yellen 2015).

Inflationary and deflationary forces in the economy are thus managed rhetorically by means of serialized communications which underwrite the persuasive authority of the monetary regime. We, as protagonists, are fully implicated in the staging of this dramas. Our expectancy of price developments in the future are self-fulfilling (Merton 1948).