Public Currency: Anthropological Labor in Central Banks

Abstract

This article examines the operation of an emerging monetary regime in which ‘mere words’, as Yellen, Janet (2013. ‘Communications in Monetary Policy.’ Speech presented at the Society of American Business Editors and Writers 50th Anniversary Conference, Washington, DC, April 4) recently noted, play a decisive role. Drawing on my field research in five central banks – the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Bundesbank, the Bank of England, the Riksbank, and the European Central Bank – I address how this regime, which I term a ‘public currency’, works in theory and practice and what is at stake in its regulation and management. At the heart of this regime is a far-reaching premise: the public must be broadly recruited to collaborate with central banks in achieving the ends of monetary policy, namely ‘stable prices and confidence in the currency’. I further argue that monetary policy is now being aligned overtly with public interests, interests that are not fully or necessarily reducible to the prerogatives of finance or the interests of financial markets.