Donald MacKenzie, Edinburgh sociologist of economics, has a nice article in the London Review of Books about the financial transaction known as the [tag]End-Of-The-World Trade[/tag]. This is a bet that the western, capitalist world goes into financial meltdown, and it used as a hedge against very uncertain trades. MacKenzie write:
“The trade is the purchase of insurance against what would in effect be the failure of the modern capitalist system. It would take a cataclysm – around a third of the leading investment-grade corporations in Europe or half those in North America going bankrupt and defaulting on their debt – for the insurance to be paid out.
I asked one investment banker what might cause half of North America’s top corporations to default. No ordinary economic recession or natural disaster short of an asteroid strike could do it: no hurricane, for example, and not even ‘the big one’, a catastrophic earthquake devastating California. All he could think of was ‘a revolutionary Marxist government in Washington’. “
Mackenzie also says this, on the computational basis of modern finance:
“The credit market is also one of the most computationally intensive activities in the modern world. An investment bank with a big presence in the market will have thousands of positions in credit default swaps, CDOs, indices and similar products. The calculations needed to understand and hedge the exposure of this portfolio to market movements are run, often overnight, on grids of several hundred interconnected computers. The banks’ modellers would love to add as many extra computers as possible to the grids, but often they can’t do so because of the limits imposed by the capacity of air-conditioning systems to remove heat from computer rooms. In the City, the strain put on electricity-supply networks can also be a problem. Those who sell computer hardware to investment banks are now sharply aware that ‘performance per watt’ is part of what they have to deliver.”