One thing that is rarely done is a literary-style analysis of the language used in finance and business. It can quickly reveal the sleight-of-hand, even outright deception, that plague these powerful sectors.
To take one example, finance language heavily relies on water metaphors, which are deeply misleading. It is unlikely that this is done deliberately; it is more probably reification (making the intangible appear to be concrete). But its consequences have been, and remain, devastating.
The water metaphors have many variants. Participants talk routinely of capital 'flows', which is the rate of transactions, or financial 'liquidity', the willingness of investors to participate in markets. Economists speculate about equilibrium — indeed one popular economic theory is General Equilibrium Theory, the notion that markets should be allowed to find their 'level', in much the same fashion that water does.
Money can be 'channelled' into investment, or sources of capital can 'dry up'. There are colloquial phrases like the 'trickle down effect' (wealth at the top will make its way to the lower levels) and 'a rising tide raises all boats' (when the economy is doing well, everyone benefits).
By creating the linguistic illusion that money is a fluid, the impression is created that resources and capital are flexible and can be moved around easily as long as barriers are removed.
The barriers to that fluid are, of course, governments, which are depicted as something like physical obstacles. Hence claims about the need to 'deregulate' the financial system in order to create greater efficiencies and encourage capital to find its appropriate level. A picture resembling a system of locks and weirs is conjured up.
It is hard to think of a more contradictory notion. For one thing, governments necessarily set the fundamental rules of money, from the fine details that determine whether paper money is legitimate, to the level of bank capital reserves or the legal strictures that apply to creditors and borrowers.
Governments cannot get out of the way; they are central to determining how transactions occur. It is why in the global financial crisis all eyes turned to government when the financial system almost collapsed. In the end, even the most libertarian of traders knew that it was governments that set the rules.
"Looking closely at word use can prove extremely revealing. In the case of finance language, what we see mostly is deceptiveness."
That unavoidable fact was concealed, however, by the use of language. By creating the metaphor of