How i created the precise idea of Emotions in Finance is the only event I cannot recall. My background in economic sociology led to some useful discoveries about the finance world. My work defending full employment and social policy was a bore to my postmodern colleagues and beneath contempt to neo-classical economists. From 1996, Australia's new right-wing government stifled policy debates: instead of decent employment we were to join a mainly Anglo-American society of shareholder capitalists; our compulsory superannuation must offer ‘choice’. Globalisation, by 1997, had become a fashionable term, but I was struck by the IMF's treatment of our neighbour Indonesia: brutal yet totally incompetent. Meantime, I was reading the work of two sociologists, Jack Barbalet's on emotions and Geoff Ingham's on money as a social relation. Both struck a chord just as the dot.com boom was becoming insane. I am old enough to have experienced Australia's ludicrous mining boom. The scrip of Poseidon and Minsec shares bought by my former husband became pretty gift wrapping in 1971, we joked in that carefree time of jobs and freedom. My parents were of the cautious generation. To my mother, a mortgage was OK, better was paying it off. My father was a ‘managing director’, not a sainted CEO of today. Each had ‘blue chip’ share portfolios and we lived comfortably.