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This chapter argues that the general acceptance of Britain's credit economy was furthered by the two other kinds of writing with which this book is concerned. More specifically, it argues that one of the effects of the differentiation between economic and imaginative writing—along with the concomitant differentiation between fact and fiction—was to naturalize the peculiarities of the credit economy and the monetary instruments on which it depended so that ordinary people would take all this for granted. By so doing, naturalization helped manage the problematic of representation that periodically emerged into visibility. The gradual process of naturalization was made possible by two adaptations of the dichotomy that governed monetary instruments (valid/invalid): in the realm of fiction, the negative connotations associated with invalid money were neutralized by the claim that imaginative writing did not have to refer to anything in the actual world; in the realm of (economic) theory, the fictive elements intrinsic to credit instruments were neutralized by the introduction of abstractions, which could claim simultaneously to be true and not to be referential. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first two focus on the gradual breakup of the fact/fiction continuum through the interrelated processes called fictionalization and factualization, and the third focuses on the way that imaginative writing contributed to the general cultural drift that eventually made the writing on monetary instruments invisible as writing—that is, as mere artifice or representation.

This chapter investigates how the notion of panic crystallizes in representations of the market and how it affects the hierarchy of speculators. The charismatic features of the latter cannot withstand crowd movements like panic. One of the major contradictions at the boundaries of markets appears to be the same as that between an individualism grounded in a vitalistic notion of force and the crowd's stampede. The chapter explores how the notion of (financial) panic, emerging almost simultaneously in economic and psychiatric writings, deals with this contradiction. It also examines how representations of panic—from the media, for instance—are used by market participants to make sense of their own actions. Based on a reconstruction of actual practices, the chapter argues that such representations should be understood as material observational tools, which help dispersed actors to see their situations as identical or similar.