Hedging the End of Finance
May 14, 2008 in capitalizing, counting, economizing, performing
Tags: sociology, finance, banks, subprime, credit, insurance, derivatives, rating, mortgage, banking, money, capitalism, crisis, crunch, cdos, mackenzie, securities, portfolio, cdo, debt, liquidity, lrb
This recent LRB piece by Donald MacKenzie is really worthwhile reading. Apart from providing a nicely pedagogical explanation of what credit derivatives and asset-backed securities do, it exposes some most curious features of contemporary financial capitalism: it’s about how serious financiers might be about the end of finance.
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May 20, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Briliant piece as usual by MacKenzie.
Talking about how serious financiers might be about the end of finance, George Soros in his interview with the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2008/04/soros_and_schwarzman_speak.html) appears to be quite serious about it. (or is this just about the end of economics?!)
He doesn’t use the word ‘performativity’ as such but I am sure he has read MacKenzie!
May 20, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Apologies, the correct link to the sound file for the interview is:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/ram/today5_soros_20080520.ram
May 20, 2008 at 6:53 pm
panik,
That’s a great interview, thanks.
Soros has another, very gentle word to talk about this sort of things (“reflexivity”).
May 21, 2008 at 10:08 am
I guess it is inevitable that he carries some LSE bagage!
It is quite easy to start from gentle ideas of reflexivity and after spending a lot of time trying to understand such processes and mechanisms end-up somewhere in the vicinity of performativity.
All this has left me wondering how long before fund managers start posting on SSFN trying to recruit people!
Although he is denounced in right wing and neocon circles as (inonicaly given his perosonal histoy) a raving socialist/anti-capitalists, he still keeps on bringing in the money.