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Article In: Journal of Language and Pop Culture: Online-First Articles

Pop goes the bubble

How financial speculation is popularized

ORCiD logo with link | Concordia University
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Abstract
This paper examines how financial instruments and processes are popularized in two books: The Big Short by Michael Lewis (2010) and Dumb Money by Ben Mezrich (2021). A series of complex concepts mainly related to speculative finance is investigated to see how these bestseller authors make them understandable to wide audiences (i.e., subprime mortgage bonds, collateralized debt obligations, and credit default swaps, short selling, short positions, short squeezes, and options). From the data collected through purposive sampling, seven popularization strategies emerge: definition, characterization, reformulation, causality, quantification, metaphor and analogy, and register variation. The analysis shows that causality and quantification appear to be the most frequent. The results are exemplified and discussed within the wider scope of scholarship that engages with financialization, or the growing influence of finance in everyday life. It is suggested that the popularizations conveyed through literary non-fiction books contribute to expanding the popularity of finance in society.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Big Short and Dumb Money in the continuum of financial popularization
  • 3.Qualitative corpus work and tailored popularization strategies
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Quantitative results: Causality comes first
    • 4.2Examples of results across popularization strategies
    • 4.3The popularization of finance and the financialization of everyday life
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Note
  • Author queries
  • References
References (61)
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