For Sophie and Jakob

Introduction

Foreword

At the beginning of this work was a dissatisfaction with how the Asian crisis and the ensuing turbulence within economics and international relations were discussed. Although I initially struggled to articulate this feeling, as an economist I lacked the political science vocabulary, the entire debate around the reform of financial markets seemed to me to be overly simplistic. The attempt to pin politics to the state while simultaneously locating the source of instability in an asymmetric information situation is as trivial as it is incorrect. Nevertheless, the idea of asymmetric information has significantly shaped the discussion. Without wanting to deny the efforts implied by this towards increased transparency and reduced corruption, the question arises whether a world of complete transparency is both possible and desirable. However, this work does not attempt to devise an alternative solution to the problems of financial markets; rather, it questions the disciplinary structures and boundaries of this discussion: Why is instability conceptualized in exactly this way? This book thus does not see itself as an observation of the first order, but rather of the second order. That is to say, I do not attempt to produce immediately practical knowledge, but rather to observe how practical knowledge, for example through the use of a specific economic risk semantics, becomes possible.