‘Then you are making riskless money’: a critical discourse analysis of credit default swap coverage in the financial trade press

Recently, scholars begun to urge an approach to the study of finance that interrogates the accepted wisdom of financial models and practices by examining the forces of power behind their development. Drawing from the field of cultural studies, Hardin and Rottinghaus (in their 2015 article, “Introducing a cultural approach to technology in financial markets”) advocate for a cultural studies of finance, which emphasizes the critical consideration of the co-constructive nature of financial technologies and cultures. This paper builds off that provocation using the concept of ‘rhetorical closure’ (as described by Pinch and Bijker in 2012) to explore how industry media aimed at derivatives developers, traders, and investment bankers worked to define the meanings of new financial technologies. Using critical discourse analysis, this study examines how credit default swaps (CDSs) were presented in the financial industry media in the years 1995–2007, and how this framing contributed to the politics of these artifacts. It finds that the financial industry media produced a discourse about CDSs using multiple overlapping frames that overgeneralized the success of CDSs from narrowly specific evidence and applied constant competitive pressure to adopt new financial technologies. These discourses implicitly encouraged the rapid adoption and broad application of CDSs, thus helping to (re)produce a financial culture in which self-interest and short-term gains were prioritized.