The performativity of the yield curve

This article explores the wide-ranging influence of the yield curve – a diagrammatic device for representing the term structure of effective interest rates on market-traded debt instruments – in contemporary monetary, financial and economic life. Drawing on the expanding literature on financial performativity, including within the field of cultural economy, the article submits that by virtue of its centrality to multiple, closely interconnected and often highly recursive sets of relations between economies, financial markets and central banks, the yield curve is performative at a range of different levels; and, parsing various different extant understandings of performativity, the article theorizes the particular nature of such performativity in the yield curve context. Against the grain of the bulk of the literature on financial performativity, however, the article also endeavors to connect the yield curve’s performativity explicitly to questions of privilege (the privileges of representation) and power (the power to perform) and their unequal distribution. That is to say, the article argues that to understand the multidimensional performativity of the yield curve, we need to draw out its political as well as cultural economy.