I'm not a finance guy

I work in finance. Not just finance, but Finance finance¹. Though deep in the bowels of financial data production, not in a high-profile trading role or anything like that. Still my working life is stalked by bears and bulls; I tried to follow an internal quant seminar last week and the jargon was vertiginous. I work in finance, but I'm not a finance guy².

My birthday was last month³. I got a book, which I ended up exchanging for another book. The book I ended up with was Collapsed Mythologies: A Geofinancial Atlas⁴ edited by Eline Benjaminsen and Dayna Casey. It's a beautiful book, with a dark green cover and illustrations on the page edges. The core of the book is an atlas⁵ of financial slang terms, describing their meaning and etymologies and providing criticism.

The chapters⁶ are organized according to a cryptically meaningful categorization of the terms relation to the materiality of finance. This means that under earths, you find entries like "Bank⁷" and "Mining⁸"; while under fauna you find "Unicorns" and all the variations upon it⁹. The authors point out in the introduction that any categorization is "strained and artificial", resulting in several duplicated entries across chapters, which I find delightful.

Some of the chapters have additional "visual essays" attempting to redefine one term from that chapter. The flora chapter has a visual essay redefining "hedge" from a technique for protecting against price movements to:

A line of closely spaced shrubs put in place to protect an manipulate the terrains of private capital. Used as a strategy to limit risk exposures of surplus wealth and property, these evergreen species can be identified as obscuring barriers, creating ruptures to other realities beyond.

The essay places the hedge in the context of the enclosure movement, where it was used for turning communal land into private property. It intersperses text on enclosure, with current financial usage of the term "hedge" and a taxonomy of the hedges present in the richest neighbourhood in the Netherlands. In the physical reality of wealth segregation and inequality, hedges are used to hide the homes of hedge fund managers. The authors take clippings of these hedges, an act that is explicitly illegal under Dutch law, while hiding money in tax havens using opaque corporate structures as a hedge is not. Throughout the essay runs a list of tax haven registered companies linked to addresses in the same neighbourhood.

This is just one of several such essays: There's one on the "vampire squid" linking the Norwegian Oil Fund back to the tentacular vampiric nature of the fossil fuel industry; another on the "hectocorn", a private company valued at more than 100 billion USD¹⁰; one on black swan events and a final one on the "witching hour" which I've yet to read. All of the ones I've finished provided a new perspective on the subject, in ways both hilarious and scary.

There are also normal essays, on undead financial institutions and the privatization/securitization and climate/development finance nexus¹¹, among other things. There's also an extract from The Swan Book by Aboriginal Australian author Alexis Wright.

The final essay¹² is by Sami Hammana, one of the original editors of The Geofinancial Lexicon which preceded the work in this volume, and the coiner of the term geofinance used to link financial jargon to material reality.

I really like this book, and as a ~financial professional~¹³ I think it should be required reading for all of us. I love when I stumble over books¹⁴ that allow me to re-evaluate the field I'm working in using a critical perspective provided from the outside. I had similar experiences with Unsustainable¹⁵ by Matthew Archer and A Vast Machine¹⁶ by Paul N. Edwards¹⁷, though these are serious academic books rather than a critical art project.

This book is also particularly valuable because it lifts the veil on a jargony, obfuscated world. Financial slang and jargon functions to ease communication between insiders, but it also functions a bit like camouflage, obfuscating the inner workings of the system and discouraging outsider's understanding. Reading this book would allow an outsider to grasp many financial discussions while also partially vaccinating against being seduced by the abstractness of the language into forgetting the materiality of all things.

I want to pull a little bit more on my personal experience as a ~finance professional~¹⁸. I work in commodities¹⁹. Commodities are raw materials that are traded in financial markets because they are fundamentally interchangeable²⁰. Electrical power, fossil fuels, metals, concrete, carbon emissions²¹ and storable agricultural products are examples. These are intensely physical. But most of the trading activities in these markets happen abstracted away from the underlying physical goods, in futures or derivatives markets²². Most market participants trading e.g. copper futures never intend to actually take possession of any physical copper, and if the were forced to do so by some mistake, it would be catastrophic for them.

Giant infrastructures of extraction, production, logistics and consumption operate to bring these commodities to where they are needed and on top of that sits another giant infrastructure of abstract contracts and byzantine derivatives that allow speculation and financial extraction. In a world where commodities are traded on exchanges, commodities markets provide a way for consumers and producers to control their risk by buying or selling advance contracts, but the total amount of abstraction here is dizzying.

Ships full of fossil fuel or wheat may be redirected in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean because some finance guy bought a contract from another finance guy. But most of the time such contracts change hands without directly impacting the shipment of goods. The money just changes hands, maybe hundreds of times while the hip is underway, redirecting profits to the financial players themselves. But if there were not commodity there would be no commodities derivatives.

Every day my employer pumps out price and fundamental²³ data to these markets, impacting the price people across the world pay for fundamental stuff like food and energy, and I work as a small cog in that vast machine²⁴ coupling the abstract and obfuscated world of finance to the real world of production, trade and consumption.

"I'm not a finance guy" I say to myself right before a bear cracks my skull open. You can find my abandoned corpse under a hedge²⁵.