Martin Kettle is right. We now have an opening up of political possibilities, which represents a liberation of sorts, though a far from comforting one. This is existentialism on a mass political scale: the bases of our former certainties are being shaken, allowing us to recognise the phoniness of what we took for reality, with all of the shock and anxiety that goes with that. It's a collective version of the moment at the beginning of Bonfire of the Vanities, when the banker's car breaks down in the South Bronx.
After September 11th, rumour had it that the Federal government had hired a team of Hollywood directors to imagine the next terrorist attack. Something so unsettling, so spectacular as 911 expanded the realms of possibility to the point where producers of spectacular fiction were potentially better judges of the future than the confounded experts. Right now, apart from Robert Peston - who must be suffering from bouts of solipsistic psychosis, as his thoughts and reality gradually blur into one - we are left only with confounded experts.
So the time has come to identify some financial science fiction writers, to come up with visions of the future. We're hearing too much about the post-apocalyptic Mad Max visions (the worst one is set in 2009 and involves the US President living in Alaska shooting moose). We need to put the bankers and economists together in a room with Hollywood directors. Here's a start:
- Speculation Day: New York, 2009. As the crisis worsens, and the state bail-outs prove powerless, one thirty-year-old hedge fund manager wanders into a second-hand bookshop and picks up a worn copy of Marx's Capital volume three. Flicking through it later in his private jet, he is horrified to discover that capitalism is structurally guaranteed to collapse. He immediately goes short on the entire future of global capitalism... and wins. He destroys, and also acquires, the infrastructure of capital, erradicating private property. In fact, this may not be so different from the type of scenario that would precipitate capitalism's collapse in Marxist theory. There has to be a mechanism that is internal to the system (unless you're a Leninist I guess), and it will be particular to the capitalism of the day. Of course the resulting scenario sounds closer to feudalism than socialism, which would mean history reversing. Or perhaps not so different from the collapse of the Russian economy into the hands of oligarchs in the 1990s.
- The Economist is bought by Hello!: I've always found Hello! magazine to be culturally rather interesting. Not simply for the gross bling imagery and weird voyeurism into the lives of John Terry-level arseholes, but because of one constantly recurring story-line. It goes something like this: "the Duchess of York invites us into her 50-acre bungalow to talk about depression, alcoholism, weight-gain, death and how she's put them all behind her to rebuild her life, find love again, shed nine stone and set up a donkey sanctuary for the children of Africa". There's a sort of post-therapy narrative that binds a lot of it together. Once The Economist's readership has dwindled to a few hundred remaining economic liberals, it will be victim to a takeover (arranged by HM Department of Magazines) by Hello!. The resulting magazine involves profiles such as "the state of Germany invites us into their post-capitalist wilderness to talk about the depression, insolvency, the end of days and how they've put it all behind them to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and criticise after dinner (as somebody once said)."
- The Fed appoints a sociologist as its Chairman: OK, so this doesn't make a lot of sense. But now that the godlike genius of Alan Greenspan has been shown up as naive short-termism, it might be time for someone who understands how to employ concepts such as 'power', 'the state', 'ideology', 'culture', 'nationalism' and so on. Who knows? Maybe someone walking in the footsteps of Simmel, with a cultural-philosophical take on money and its associated psychology, might be just the person. Failing that, give the job to someone like David Harvey with a proper understanding of crises.
I've just remembered that The Corrections ends with a rather clawing attempt at something like financial science fiction (one character buys shares in an Eastern European nation from his stockbroker) which slightly tarnishes the book, so apologies. But any additions, gratefully received below.
In a sense, if one remembers weird things such as Robert Shiller's Macro Markets, there's a bunch of economists out there who are actually very much into "Fi-Sci-Fi".
Posted by: typewritten | October 16, 2008 at 11:30 PM