Producing trust in country financial narratives

This chapter explores how economists at Goldman Sachs deployed proprietary research and ‘thought leadership’ to contest and transform existing discourses of emerging markets as ‘risky and volatile’ by building trust in the BRIC nations as stable, rational investment cases. The chapter uses conceptualizations of system trust, power and knowledge to examine the ways in which the BRIC constituted a series of purposive acts that ‘carried’ (Fairclough, 2006; 70) both trust and mistrust to specific places in the financial system in order to protect the status of the financial experts recommending emerging markets investments.