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This paper studies the effect of sentiment on asset prices during the 20th century (1905 to 2005). As a proxy for sentiment, we use the fraction of positive and negative words in two columns of financial news from the New York Times. The main contribution of the paper is to show that, controlling for other well-known time-series patterns, the predictability of stock returns using news' content is concentrated in recessions. A one standard deviation shock to our news measure during recessions predicts a change in the conditional average return on the DJIA of 12 basis points over one day.

Drawing on documentary sources and 114 interviews with market participants, this and a companion article discuss the development and use in finance of the Gaussian copula family of models, which are employed to estimate the probability distribution of losses on a pool of loans or bonds, and which were centrally involved in the credit crisis. This article, which explores how and why the Gaussian copula family developed in the way it did, employs the concept of 'evaluation culture', a set of practices, preferences and beliefs concerning how to determine the economic value of financial instruments that is shared by members of multiple organizations. We identify an evaluation culture, dominant within the derivatives departments of investment banks, which we call the 'culture of no-arbitrage modelling', and explore its relation to the development of Gaussian copula models. The article suggests that two themes from the science and technology studies literature on models (modelling as 'impure' bricolage, and modelling as articulating with heterogeneous objectives and constraints) help elucidate the history of Gaussian copula models in finance.

A powerful reading of a mode of popular fiction made especially salient in an age of increasing financialization.Argues that contemporary realism has been shaped by the increasing abstraction by which neoliberal finance has come to rewrite what counts as real. Building on both established and emerging discussions of literature and finance,Finance Fictionstakes the measure of the tension between psychosis and realism in the contemporary finance novel. Revisiting such twentieth-century classics of the genre as Tom Wolfe'sBonfire of the Vanitiesand Bret Easton Ellis'sAmerican Psycho, this book considers that the twenty-first century is witnessing the birth of a new kind of finance novel that in the face of an ongoing economic crisis, ever more frequent market crashes, and the politics of austerity, pursues a more realist approach to the actual workings of the economy. But what kind of realism would be attuned to today's economic reality of high-frequency trading, dominated by complex financial instruments like collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, and digital algorithms operating at speeds faster than what human beings or computers can record? If Tom Wolfe in 1989 could still urge novelists to work harder to \"tame the billion-footed beast of reality\", it seems today's economic reality confronts us with a difference that is qualitative rather than quantitative: a new financial ontology requiring new modes of thinking and writing. Mobilizing the philosophical thought of Quentin Meillassoux in the close-reading of finance novels by Robert Harris, Michel Houellebecq, Ben Lerner and less well-known works of conceptual writing such as Mathew Timmons' Credit, Finance Fictions argues that realism is in for a speculative update if it wants to take on the contemporary economy-an \"if\" whose implications turn out to be deeply political. Part literary study and part philosophical inquiry,Finance Fictionsseeks to contribute to a new mindset for creative and critical work on finance in the twenty-first century. Features readings of popular novels, such as Tom Wolfe's \"Bonfire of the Vanities\" and Bret Easton Ellis' \"American Psycho,\" as well as more recent works by Robert Harris, Michel Houellebecq, and others.

More than perhaps any other major filmmaker, Martin Scorsese has grappled with the idea of the American Dream. His movies are full of working-class strivers hoping for a better life, from the titular waitress and aspiring singer of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore to the scrappy Irish immigrants of Gangs of New York. And in films as varied as Casino, The Aviator, and The Wolf of Wall Street, he vividly displays the glamour and power that can come with the fulfillment of that dream, but he also shows how it can turn into a nightmare of violence, corruption, and greed.   This book is the first study of Scorsese's profound ambivalence toward the American Dream, the ways it drives some men and women to aspire to greatness, but leaves others seduced and abandoned. Showing that Scorsese understands the American dream in terms of a tension between provincialism and cosmopolitanism, Jim Cullen offers a new lens through which to view such seemingly atypical Scorsese films as The Age of Innocence, Hugo, and Kundun. Fast-paced, instructive, and resonant, Martin Scorsese and the American Dream illuminates an important dimension of our national life and how a great artist has brought it into focus.

An \"engaging and well-researched study [of] ordinary people who joined together to challenge financial institutions\" ( Choice). Banks and bankers are hardly the most beloved institutions and people in this country. With its corruptive influence on politics and stranglehold on the American economy, Wall Street is held in high regard by few outside the financial sector. But the pitchforks raised against this behemoth are largely rhetorical: We rarely see riots in the streets or public demands for an equitable and democratic banking system that result in serious national changes. Yet the situation was vastly different a century ago, as Christopher W. Shaw shows. This book upends the conventional thinking that financial policy in the early twentieth century was set primarily by the needs and demands of bankers. Shaw shows that banking and politics were directly shaped by the literal and symbolic investments of the grassroots. This engagement remade financial institutions and the national economy, through populist pressure and the establishment of federal regulatory programs and agencies like the Farm Credit System and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Shaw reveals the surprising groundswell behind seemingly arcane legislation, as well as the power of the people to demand serious political repercussions for the banks that caused the Great Depression. One result of this sustained interest and pressure was legislation and regulation that brought on a long period of relative financial stability, with a reduced frequency of economic booms and busts. Ironically, this stability led to the decline of the very banking politics that brought it about. Giving voice to a broad swath of American figures, including workers, farmers, politicians, and bankers alike, Money, Power, and the People recasts our understanding of what might be possible in balancing the needs of the people with those of their financial institutions.

Blank Canvas is a four-point theory of twentieth century UK Art School creativity, highlighting the philosophies and practices that have influenced the development of punk, post punk, and new wave musicians. A framework for creativity emerges for artists and musicians, aiming to define the future. 20 b&w illus. New Books Network (New Books in Pop Culture) interview with Simon Strange.

During the past quarter century, free-market capitalism was recognized not merely as a successful system of wealth creation, but as the key determinant of the health of political and cultural democracy. Now, renowned British journalist and historian Godfrey Hodgson takes aim at this popular view in a book that promises to become one of the most important political histories of our time. More Equal Than Others looks back on twenty-five years of what Hodgson calls \"the conservative ascendancy\" in America, demonstrating how it has come to dominate American politics. Hodgson disputes the notion that the rise of conservatism has spread affluence and equality to the American people. Quite the contrary, he writes, the most distinctive feature of American society in the closing years of the twentieth century was its great and growing inequality. He argues that the combination of conservative ideology and corporate power and dominance by mass media obsessed with lifestyle and celebrity have caused America to abandon much of what was best in its past. In fact, he writes, income and wealth inequality have become so extreme that America now resembles the class-stratified societies of early twentieth-century Europe.

Behind every financial crisis lurks a \"political bubble\"--policy biases that foster market behaviors leading to financial instability. Rather than tilting against risky behavior, political bubbles--arising from a potent combination of beliefs, institutions, and interests--aid, abet, and amplify risk. Demonstrating how political bubbles helped create the real estate-generated financial bubble and the 2008 financial crisis, this book argues that similar government oversights in the aftermath of the crisis undermined Washington's response to the \"popped\" financial bubble, and shows how such patterns have occurred repeatedly throughout US history. The authors show that just as financial bubbles are an unfortunate mix of mistaken beliefs, market imperfections, and greed, political bubbles are the product of rigid ideologies, unresponsive and ineffective government institutions, and special interests. Financial market innovations--including adjustable-rate mortgages, mortgage-backed securities, and credit default swaps--become subject to legislated leniency and regulatory failure, increasing hazardous practices. The authors shed important light on the politics that blinds regulators to the economic weaknesses that create the conditions for economic bubbles and recommend simple, focused rules that should help avoid such crises in the future. The first full accounting of how politics produces financial ruptures,Political Bubblesoffers timely lessons that all sectors would do well to heed.

Under the New Deal framework for money and payments-which had its roots in the National Bank Act of 1864-banks in the United States were governed in many respects as public utilities. Charters were available only where they were consistent with public convenience and need, the usual standard for utilities. Banks enjoyed an exclusive privilege to ment the supply, maintaining deposit account balances that households and businesses could use as a means of payment and store of value. Banks were largely limited to conducting activities consistent with their monetary purpose. Geographic expansion was constrained to promote adequate service to local communities. And a government agency, the Federal Reserve, regulated the quantity of bank money in circulation and set the interest that accrued to its holders. The result was an unprecedented period of overall financial stability that lasted more or less until 2008. Unfortunately, policymakers have steadily undermined and degraded key elements of this system, and now its logic has been largely forgotten. Deposit alternatives-financial products that as a formal, legal matter are distinct from bank deposits but that function like them in practice -match or exceed deposits in value, and the country's once-diffuse banking system has given way to a top-heavy financial architecture in which a handful of complex conglomerates engage in a broad range of monetary and nonmonetary financial activities with little meaningful government oversight. Although policymakers dramatically expanded regulation after the 2008 financial crisis, we still face rolling panics, a central bank committed to backstopping much of private finance, massive rent extraction by Wall Street, and democratic decline. This paper offers a blueprint for reform: what we call a New National Banking system. Our goal is part restoration, part innovation. We aim to both renew the framework that undergirded American prosperity in the twentieth century and refine it by improving access to bank services and Associate carrying through on the law's public utility vision where previous policymakers came up short. The proposal is structural, not technocratic - banking law, not \"finreg.\" Consequently, it is conceptually and legally simple: it involves fairly surgical changes and can be implemented through a series of incremental adjustments, which we delineate herein.