Paul Crosthwaite

Paul Crosthwaite

I'm a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, with a particular interest in the intersections of literature, culture and economics.

Location United Kingdom

Activity

  • Great, thanks Richard!

  • Thanks Ian. Yes, Crabapple's work definitely taps into a tradition of satirical depiction that goes back to eighteenth-century artists like Hogarth - a sense of the mysterious/supernatural is very much part of that.

  • Thanks Alyson - these are all brilliant books!

  • Thanks Stephen. Yes, it's very much this now-iconic image of the trading floor that the current BBC series Industry - set in a City investment bank - makes use of: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m000pb89/industry?seriesId=m000pb87 Worth a look if you haven't seen it

  • Good point Mike, thanks. Alex Preda's book Framing Finance is a great study of how markets became increasingly defined as divided between "insiders" and "outsiders." https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo6682322.html

  • Thanks Claire. The author Benjamin Myers recently published an interesting novel about this group, The Gallows Pole: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/25/the-gallows-pole-benjamin-myers-review

  • Thanks Alyson - yes, definitely a particularly ignominious episode, in a history replete with them!

  • Thanks Mike. That sense of these financial phenonema as remote or cosmic is nicely captured in this art project: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/dec/01/black-shoals-dark-matter-somerset-house-london-exhibition

  • Thanks Philip. Yes, the stones are a helpful indication of how a collective agreement to treat something as money and hence as possessing value can avoid the need for the substance itself actually to be present.

  • Thanks Leny. Yes, in crises we often see the phenomenon of a "flight to safety" or "quality" on the part of investors - and gold is often top of their lists. This seems to suggest that the idea of gold as having a fundamental or essential value still carries a lot of weight (in every sense!).

  • Thanks Ian - that's a very valid point, though one of the issues with the international gold standard around the turn of the twentieth century was that expansionary economic conditions were heavily dependent on whether or not prospectors happened to find sufficient gold deposits in the earth. Some saw this as an arbitrary and contingent basis for the global...

  • This is very much what we're aiming to identify and explore in this course!

  • Thanks - this is a great example of how money isn't simply a neutral phenomenon, but is suffused with cultural meanings and values.

  • Thanks Trev - I'm certainly familiar with how notes withdrawn north of the border can be looked at askance further south!

  • Welcome to the course - hope you enjoy it.

  • Great - I hope the course will deliver on that. Welcome!

  • Glad you enjoyed!

  • Thanks - pleased to hear that you enjoyed those segments.

  • Ah, the old "just throw darts at the stock listings page of the newspaper - chances are you'll do as well as the average fund manager" approach! https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickferri/2012/12/20/any-monkey-can-beat-the-market/#37ed6ea3630a

  • Great to hear, thanks.

  • Pleased to hear that it gave you a broadened perspective Nadine.

  • Glad you found it worthwhile!

  • Hi Leslie, by way of a (non?) answer, here's something Nicky, Peter, and I wrote in a forthcoming piece on "Theologies of Money" (quoting a great LRB article by John Lanchester):

    “Why on earth” do Bitcoin and other crytopcurrencies, have “any value at all” (Lanchester 2016) – why are people willing to accept these (self-proclaimed) forms of money in...

  • Good to hear Cynthia, thanks!

  • This is an interesting point Mary, thanks. There's a school of thought that e.g. the railway boom, the dot-com boom of the late 1990s - while they might have been at least in part bubbles, and caused some heavy losses and failures - were also necessary or worthwhile because they left us with genuinely useful infrastructure (rail networks, key aspects of the...

  • Yes, that sense of "ureality" (noted by commentators in 1929, as above) seems very resonant now.

  • On this point, I like this observation from a journalist of the time, Garet Garrett:

    The basic delusion was that we had entered a fourth-dimensional economic world. The wonderful feature of this new world was that all possibilities of increase were infinite. There was no longer any limit upon the rise of common stocks. Since this was obvious to everyone, it...

  • Thanks Mary. The relationship between the Great Crash and the Great Depression is notoriously disputed, but I find Maury Klein's argument in Rainbow’s End: The Crash of 1929 (OUP, 2001) persuasive: that the one didn't cause the other in some straightforward or mechanistic way, but that the crash altered the public mood, generating a shift from confidence to...

  • Thanks Sam - I think the comparison with contemporary Silicon Valley-style tech start-ups is very apposite!

  • Yes, the language we use - and the emotions attached to that language - can definitely have very real financial and economic effects.

  • Yes, 2020 will definitely go down as another of those years that's synonymous with crisis (of more than one kind in this case).

  • Well, that's about double the length of the hypothetical Kondratiev Wave, so there might be something in it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave

  • Great to hear, thanks Silvia.

  • Thanks. Yes, we often see a hierarchy - from most to least respectable - of investment/speculation/gambling. But then the closer you look, the blurrier the dividing lines appear...

  • Glad you enjoyed it - and found it realistic!

  • Good, thanks!

  • Thanks John. Yes, the old jibe aimed at authors of investment advice: "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"!

  • Thanks. Yes, there's the idea that modern democracy itself was born over (probably pretty terrible!) coffee in these kinds of establishments https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/the-coffee-house-a-cultural-history-by-markman-ellis-755015.html

  • Great, thanks.

  • Thanks John. Yes, it's difficult to see Dorothy et al in the same light after learning about the allegorical interpretation!

  • Great to hear!

  • Pleased you've found it rewarding so far!

  • Great to hear, thanks!

  • Thanks all. There was a brilliant exhibition on precisely this theme at the Jewish Museum in London last year https://jewishmuseum.org.uk/exhibitions/jews-money-myth/

  • Thanks Janet. I'm fascinated by this piece too, especially the excess and wastefulness it embodies. More here, in case you're interested! https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/what-a-waste-of-money(8305a215-ed78-4eb4-b0f3-97dd324b8d25).html

  • Thanks, welcome to the course.

  • Thanks Doanh - welcome to the course.

  • Welcome to the course Ken. Hopefully you'll find that the history it covers has a lot of relevance to the current situation.

  • Welcome to the course 'Wale - it's good to have you!

  • Welcome Alan - hope you find the course informative.

  • Welcome to the course Lee - I think a lot of it will chime with what's happening now!

  • Welcome to the course Thang - hope you enjoy it.

  • Thanks Barbara. Even probably the most renowned hedge fund manager in the world - Ray Dalio - admits to having missed this one! https://moneyweek.com/economy/people/601049/ray-dalio-the-seer-blindsided-by-a-bug

  • Thanks Marta. This comedy sketch perhaps isn't the most historically authentic depiction, but maybe gives a flavour, and is quite fun! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjN8q5rwLoo

  • Great to hear, thanks Tom.

  • Thanks, great to hear.

  • Really pleased to hear that you've found it consistently enjoyable so far Cynthia, thanks.

  • Great, thanks for the comment.

  • Thanks for the interesting reflections Marta. Weeks 2 and 3 will hopefully provide prompts to develop these ideas further.

  • Glad you've enjoyed it so far Rhi. As a fellow Janeite I like that material a lot too!

  • Great to hear Sonia, thanks.

  • Really pleased that the course is providing some new perspectives - thanks for the comment.

  • Great to hear Sally - thanks.

  • Thanks Esther. More interesting examples of defacement for political purposes here: https://www.glam.ox.ac.uk/outinoxford-ash-banknote

  • Thanks. I'm always struck by visualizations of how much - or rather, how little - gold has been mined in millenia of human history, e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21969100

  • Thanks for this. What you describe was a problem under the "classical" international gold standard of the late ninteenth and early twentieth centuries. The money supply was critically reliant on digging sufficient gold out of the ground. This struck some commentators - John Maynard Keynes springs to mind - as a bizarrely old-fashioned way to run a moden global...

  • Thanks Aidan. The barter theory of the origin of money - based in the problem of the double coincidence of wants - makes perfect sense. The only problem is that historians and anthropologists have found very little evidence that this is what actually happened! David Graeber has a great chapter on this in Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

  • Agreed - how we feel about money definitely says a lot about our ideas and values more generally, I think.

  • Thanks for this Ellie. So "economic capital" (i.e. money) can translate into what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would call "symbolic capital" (i.e. respect, renown, prestige, etc.) or "social capital" (i.e. connection, networking, etc.). It can entail "wealth" in more than a strictly financial sense.

  • Interesting Zoltan, thanks. So although we know that gold is just an arbitrarily privileged substance, it still feels more "real" and therefore more secure in a crisis?

  • Welcome to the course Lauren. Hopefully it'll be a good complement to your studies.

  • Glad you've found it intriguing to think about these issues so far David.

  • Great to hear Barbara, thanks.

  • Thanks Linda. Very interesting to think that Covid-19 - along with all of its other effects - might hasten the moves towards a cashless society. We're certainly going to be more conscious of those dirty bits of paper/coins we hand back and forth after this. On which you might (or might not) want to take a look at this recent art-money project....

  • Thanks Katherine. The comparison with land/real estate is interesting. If a plot of land (all the more so a house or other property) was now covered by the sea, you might feel that it no longer had the same (if any) value; but with the money-stones it doesn't seem to matter...

  • Thanks James. I've always been fascinated by the phenonemon of people wilfully destroying money/wealth. In fact, I wrote about it following the last global financial crisis... https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/files/11153618/Blood_on_the_trading_floor_Waste_Sacrifice_and_death_in_financial_crises.pdf

  • Thanks for these great links and examples Katherine. J.S.G. Boggs (mentioned above) is an example of a money artist who got into all kinds of trouble for his alterations of bank notes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._S._G._Boggs

  • That's interesting - money widens the range of possibilities available to us. Very true!

  • So it's not so much about money itself as what money can by? It's interesting that even people who have palaces and the most luxurious lifestyles often seem to want to accrue for money anyway, as if it's become an end in itself!

  • Thanks, and welcome.

  • Welcome to the course Alina, great to have you join us. Maybe you'll be able to teach him a thing or two by the time you've finished!

  • @TimPeters Thanks for all of your fantastic contributions Tim - really valuable and stimulating throughout.

  • Great to hear Gery - thanks!

  • Thanks Daniel. Yes, this is a fascinating effect - the way in which, if enough people believe that the market will behave in particular way, and base their trading decisions on that belief, then it may well in fact behave in that way. It's not so much that a particular theory is "true" as that it *makes itself* true. Scholars in the Social Studies of Finance,...

  • Thanks Tim for the really considered response - very clarifying.

  • Interestingly, there *is* some evidence to suggest that women are more successful investors than men - see e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/nov/24/the-truth-about-investing-women-do-it-better-than-men

  • This strikes a chord Tim: one of the things investment advice writers often try (in rather convoluted ways) to explain is why they're giving all of their trading secrets away, if they work so effectively!

  • Thanks Beate. We deal in detail with financial crises in week 3, and you're right that the advent of algorithmic trading technology has brought new potential for massive, near-instantaneous crashes to occur. More on this in step 2.12.

  • This is interesting Tim - thanks. You evidently have some confidence in the idea of securities markets as being mechanisms for determining the "true" values of assets. Would you see the phenomenon of the asset bubble as a temporary deviation from this norm, or something that troubles it more fundamentally?

  • Thanks Beate - these are great resources.

  • Thanks Tim. That's interesting about how brain chemistry is implicated in all this. The emerging field of "Neuroeconomics" addresses this issue - good overview here: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/what-is-neuroeconomics

  • Very interesting reflections from Bondo and Martín, making persuasive cases for a distinction between the speculator and the gambler. I wonder how the figure of the invester fits into this. Someone all the more rational, detached, long-termist, etc.?

  • Thanks David. This is a nice write up of the whole monkeys/dartboard phenomenon! https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2014/06/04/no-monkey-business

  • Interesting discussion, thanks both. This debate has been going on for a long time. In the 1920s, the economist and investment manager Edgar Lawrence Smith published a book, Common Stocks as Long Term Investments, which claimed that stocks were actually more reliable investments than bonds, historically. After the 1929 Wall Street Crash, some would blame Smith...

  • Thanks for this Pam. That's right - just having a pension in effect makes you a stock/bond market investor by proxy, so worth understanding as much as one can about how those markets work! We value all contributions from everyone on the course - no matter their level of existing knowledge - so do please share your thoughts. That's interesting about the Knights...

  • Good to hear Aditya. Thanks for your interesting contributions so far.

  • Interesting Jeffery - thanks. Traditionally, we tend to think of retail banking as a rather staid, conservative field (the stern, fastidious bank manager, etc.), but I like this idea of banks as being in the business not (only) of making loans, but of selling dreams - making them very much akin to the wish-fulfilment world of advertising.