“The subprime crisis revealed a simple fact, that is, that finance is nothing but a fraud,” a former derivatives trader at a major Japanese securities firm, told me in July 2009. He noted that financial market insiders like himself had known this all along, but now that the fraudulent nature of finance had been disclosed, he believed that no further innovation of financial technologies would be possible. For many financial market professionals I have known in Tokyo since the late 1990s, the era of finance, the era in which financial market professionals were regarded as movers and shakers of economy and society, has ended.
What does this widely shared sense of the end of finance mean for the future of capitalism whose creative and destructive force finance has demonstrated repeatedly over the last three decades? What does it mean for financial market professionals whose careers and lives have been driven by utopian imaginaries and dreams of economic, social and personal transformation inspired by techniques and theories of finance? What does it mean for critics of capitalism who have long predicted the burst of financial markets and their underlying deceptive and destructive logics?
In order to answer these questions, I turn to dreams of capitalism that have manifested themselves in the career and intellectual trajectories of members of a small derivatives trading team originally founded inside a major Japanese securities firm in 1987. For these traders, techniques and theories of finance, particularly, the logics of arbitrage, have served as sources of inspiration for highly reflexive imaginations of world making and renewal. These traders’ dreams and intellectual adventures embody the energy, speed and utopianism of financial innovation since the 1980s, on the one hand, and the social and personal cost of that innovation, on the other.
Snacks will be provided.