Abstract
Financial bubbles are generally understood retrospectively as ruptures or bursts, indexing some form of radical change. Conversely, this article proposes that when engaged ethnographically, bubbles are premised upon a collectively imagined continuity. Empirically, I unpack investment rationales in the wake of a local resource boom in a high-growth region in Inner Mongolia. Among interlocutors, anticipated price increases in property investments were not considered as speculation; investments were not hopes of a radically different future. Rather, they were imaginative ways of pulling a future of continuous growth into the present. What I relate as a present continuous . I argue that optimism understood through this temporal sensibility does not serve to freeze time but instead dictates continuity as the only possible kind of change. Finally, I suggest that collective efforts to adhere to the temporality of the bubble were also actively contributing to its collapse.
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