Codes of Finance

양장본 Hardcover

Lepinay, Vincent Antonin 저자(글)

Princeton University Press · 2011년 08월 28일

책 소개

This title highlights the massive costs of investment banking's hubristic dream of manufacturing global financial services that derive their value from multiple economies across the world.
Vincent Antonin Lepinay is assistant professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the coauthor (with Bruno Latour) of "The Science of Passionate Interests".
" Codes of Financeis an unusual, provocative, and compelling account of today's structured financial products, from their inception at the desks and computer screens of financial engineers through their evolving agency in the world of trading, to their marketing, sale, and explosive afterlives. This is a tour de force merging science and technology studies with the new social studies of finance, and essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the codes and pragmatic unfoldings of contemporary financial capitalism."--Bill Maurer, University of California, Irvine "We have not seen an ethnography like Codes of Financein a long time. Through the prism of innovative financial services designed in a French bank, Vincent L?inay asks us to revise our conception of organizations, innovations, profit, and speculation, and makes clear why the issue is not so much how to get rid of derivatives as why we need to understand them."--Michel Callon, ?ole des Mines de Paris "Investment banks are enormously important, yet few social scientists have been inside them. L?inay's fine ethnography takes us into trading rooms and back offices, examining machines as well as people, and investigating the variety of specialized languages needed to capture the properties of financial products. His book is a vital introduction to a style of economic sociology very different from that dominant in the Anglo-American world."--Donald MacKenzie, author of An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets " Codes of Financesets a new standard for the ethnography of finance. This is the first ethnographic study to focus directly on financial formulas (or "products"), without caricaturing them or domesticating financial reasoning to well-trodden academic debates. It powerfully communicates the detail of financial knowledge--detail about the formulas, their production, and their interpretation by various human and nonhuman actants--from an astonishing range of vantage points within the knowledge production process. The book is a must-read for anthropologists of knowledge and for creative thinkers within the financial markets alike."--Annelise Riles, author of Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets "In this rich and fascinating ethnography, Vincent L?inay takes the reader through the front and back offices of derivatives trading. L?inay understands the codes--the secrets, the software, and the silent frames--of finance. This is must reading for economic sociologists as well as for anyone interested in the forefront of new research on organizations and technology. A wonderful book."--David Stark, author of The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life "We are the masters of what we create--that is the myth. The reality is that we often do not even understand what we create. As L?inay shows, this is the case with today's engineered financial products. This book is an important step toward solving the mystery of the lack of mastery in the world of finance."--Bruno Latour, coauthor of Laboratory Life
The financial industry's invention of complex products such as credit default swaps and other derivatives has been widely blamed for triggering the global financial crisis of 2008. Codes of Financetakes readers behind the scenes of the equity derivatives business at one of the world's leading investment banks before the crisis, providing a detailed firsthand account of the creation, marketing, selling, accounting, and management of these financial instruments--and of how they ultimately created havoc inside and outside the bank. Vincent Antonin L pinay, a former employee of the bank, investigates the journey of a derivative through the bank's front, middle, and back offices. In the process, he provides a rare look at the strange world of quants, traders, salespeople, accountants, and others involved in a self-annihilating form of life in which securities designed by the bank eventually threaten its infrastructure. Throughout, he tries to understand the baffling languages of engineered financial products and the often-conflicting bodies of expertise that are mobilized to create them. Codes of Financehighlights the massive costs of investment banking's hubristic dream of manufacturing global financial services that derive their value from multiple economies across the world. Yet the book challenges simplistic condemnations of financial engineering by showing that derivation is the central operator of economic life--stretching far beyond the phenomenon of financial derivatives themselves. Essential reading for economic sociologists and financial economists, as well as for readers curious to decipher modern finance, this is the first serious study of the intellectual and organizational puzzles raised by the controversial products of contemporary financial engineering.
The financial industry's invention of complex products such as credit default swaps and other derivatives has been widely blamed for triggering the global financial crisis of 2008. Codes of Financetakes readers behind the scenes of the equity derivatives business at one of the world's leading investment banks before the crisis, providing a detailed firsthand account of the creation, marketing, selling, accounting, and management of these financial instruments--and of how they ultimately created havoc inside and outside the bank. Vincent Antonin L?inay, a former employee of the bank, investigates the journey of a derivative through the bank's front, middle, and back offices. In the process, he provides a rare look at the strange world of quants, traders, salespeople, accountants, and others involved in a self-annihilating form of life in which securities designed by the bank eventually threaten its infrastructure. Throughout, he tries to understand the baffling languages of engineered financial products and the often-conflicting bodies of expertise that are mobilized to create them. Codes of Financehighlights the massive costs of investment banking's hubristic dream of manufacturing global financial services that derive their value from multiple economies across the world. Yet the book challenges simplistic condemnations of financial engineering by showing that derivation is the central operator of economic life--stretching far beyond the phenomenon of financial derivatives themselves. Essential reading for economic sociologists and financial economists, as well as for readers curious to decipher modern finance, this is the first serious study of the intellectual and organizational puzzles raised by the controversial products of contemporary financial engineering.
The first in-depth anthropological study of how banks invent new financial products. . . . Lepinay spent nearly two years in a huge French bank that he refers to as General Bank, and his study is both highly revealing and slightly farcical. -- The Guardian

작가정보

저자(글) Lepinay, Vincent Antonin

목차

• Acknowledgments vii Preface Financial Innovation from within the Bank ix Prologue A Day in a Trader's Life 1 Introduction Questioning Finance 6 Part I From Models to Books 23 Chapter 1: Thinking Financially and Exploring the Code 29 Chapter 2: Hedging and Speculating with Portfolios 55 Part II: Topography of a Secret Experiment 87 Chapter 3: The Trading Room as a Market 91 Chapter 4: The Memory of Banking 119 Part III: Porous Banking: Clients and Investors in Search of Accounts 153 Chapter 5: Selling Finance and the Promise of Contingency 157 Chapter 6: The Costs of Price 182 Chapter 7: Reverse Finance 204 Conclusion What Good Are Derivatives? 222 Appendix A: Capital Guarantee Product: The Full Prospectus 233 Notes 235 Bibliography 265 Index 277

기본정보

ISBN	9780691151502 ( 0691151504 )
발행(출시)일자	2011년 08월 28일
쪽수	280쪽
크기	163 * 236 * 28 mm / 544 g
총권수	1권
언어	영어