'It's the romance, not the finance, that makes the business worth pursuing': disclosing a new market culture

This paper argues that the new economy was a rhetorical fabrication, which, through the ability of stakeholders like the cultural circuit of capital, was able to define what the facts consisted of and to train up bodies that bent to those facts. This fabrication could therefore produce regularities in the world. In the first instance, the chief beneficiary was the financial sector, which was able to use the new economy rhetoric to engineer a financial bubble. But, even after the inevitable financial crash, the new economy has left a legacy which should not be scoffed at.