Gaming the Market: A Discourse Analysis of The Federal Reserve's Co-Expansion of State and Capital Power in the Early 2020s

In this dissertation, I consider the Federal Reserve’s national economic management through the acute crises of the early 2020s. Drawing on theories of political economy, macro-finance, bio-politics, govern-mentality, and institutional legitimation, and with a method of discourse analysis that situates institutional discourse within the modern capitalist conjuncture, I examine a wide range of texts produced by the Federal Reserve during the period. I argue that the U.S. central bank managed to expand both state and financial market power through the early 2020s, in a co-constitutive and lasting manner. I consider the relevance of this dual expansion – and the central bank’s techniques to achieve it – for debates surrounding the character of neo-liberalism and whether modern capitalism or the state have gone through a post-neoliberal conjunctural shift. Theorizing the Fed’s market gaming, I emphasize how market failures lead to greater degrees of state power to ensure “smooth market functioning,” and that the Fed tries to legitimize perceptions of expanded state power and decreased marketed freedom by utilizing market-based techniques of expansion that try to maintain the myth of market autonomy and self-regulation. Relatedly, I examine the role of the numerous, compounding governmentalities that inform the Fed’s governance, such as why the Fed pulls certain monetary levers, communicates certain knowledges, and constructs a certain institutional identity. I underscore how each technique of governance at the Fed is simultaneously a technique of and for (1) market governance, (2) communicative governance, (3) self‑governance, and (4) crisis governance. I find that decisions at the Fed cannot be made without attending to each of these spheres of governance, which compel their own relatively distinct but holistic rationalizations and strategies. The Fed cannot make and implement a decision about the financial markets (market governance) without thinking about how it appears to the public (communicative governance), and relatedly, how that appearance impacts perceptions of Federal Reserve institutional legitimacy (self-governance). Conversely, the Fed cannot make a public statement without thinking about how it may affect markets (market governance), and relatedly, again, how the statement could impact perceptions of institutional legitimacy (self-governance). In turn, all techniques of market, communicative, and self-governance are in the service of avoiding or stabilizing crisis (crisis governance) – whether a market crisis, state legitimacy crisis, or a reinforcing combination. Through my work, I show how this ultimate central bank goal – stability and order; macroprudence – has compelled exceptionalist techniques in each realm of governance. I show how back-to-back acute crises in the early 2020s created the conditions for an extended state-of-exception at the Federal Reserve. In this state-of-exception, the Fed utilized old and new techniques of crisis management in the service of not only rescuing but strengthening a co-constitutively financialized, inequitable, and undemocratic political economy.