LOCAL DEALS AND HIGH FINANCE: INTERNATIONAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN CAR DEALING AND CURRENCY TRADING

Geoffrey Lightfoot
Additional contact information
Geoffrey Lightfoot: Department of Management, Keele University, United Kingdom

Journal of Enterprising Culture (JEC), 1999, vol. 07, issue 04, 347-364

Abstract: Von Mises famously declared that all human action, unfettered by the state is entrepreneurial. Yet curiously, it is where the state and the market collide that some of the more striking aspects of entrepreneurialism are made most visible. Most spectacularly, where governments have attempted to control currencies through both rhetoric and financial intervention, currency traders have stepped in to take advantage of the difference between the set value and the 'market' rate. As a result, high profile traders such as Soros have achieved notoriety for their calculated exploitation of the currency instability.This battle is repeated at a more terrestrial level. A new market sector has opened up as entrepreneurial car dealers have taken advantage of the strong pound by buying Japanese automotive exotica and selling them for less than the more mundane versions command in the UK. Such moves have also been strongly opposed - Mitsubishi, for example, has traded on the rhetoric of differences in government safety standards in an attempt to curtail such trading.Currency trading and car dealing initially appear wildly different trading environments. Yet a close reading of the accounts given by and of these entrepreneurs reveals considerable similarity in their approaches to the calculation of potential margin, entrepreneurial action, inequalities and regulation, implying a need for greater awareness of discursive resources when discussing entrepreneurship.

Date: 1999
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0218495899000212
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:jecxxx:v:07:y:1999:i:04:n:s0218495899000212

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S0218495899000212

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Enterprising Culture (JEC) is currently edited by Teck-Meng Tan

More articles in Journal of Enterprising Culture (JEC) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().