Local Deals And High Finance: International Entrepreneurship In Car Dealing And Currency Trading

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.