Preface
Introduction
Benjamin Lee and Randy Martin
Part I.
Chapter 1. The Wealth of Dividuals
Arjun Appadurai
Chapter 2. Ritual in Financial Life
Edward LiPuma
Chapter 3. From Primitives to Derivatives
Benjamin Lee
Part II.
Chapter 4. Liquidity
Robert Meister
Chapter 5. From the Critique of Political Economy to the Critique of Finance
Randy Martin
Part III.
Chapter 6. Remarks on Financial Models
Emanuel Derman
Chapter 7. On Black-Scholes
Elie Ayache
Chapter 8. Mapping the Trading Desk: Derivative Value through Market Making
Robert Wosnitzer
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index
Craig Calhoun, director, London School of Economics
“Derivatives have been a transformative financial innovation but have multiplied risks and complexities. Lee and Martin make an important contribution tracing the history of derivatives, how they work, and why they are important beyond technical finance.”
Dick Bryan, coauthor of Capitalism with Derivatives
“The idea that financial derivatives can be used to reveal new ways of framing social wealth and struggles over the distribution of that wealth is as inspired as it will be controversial. This collection of exceptional scholars from diverse disciplines may well be turning the study of finance and social change on its head.”
Ole Bjerg, author of Making Money and Parallax of Growth
“A very ambitious effort to not only understand the derivative logic of financial markets through concepts of anthropology, sociology, and philosophy but also to understand the social through the logic of the derivative. It stands out not only as a truly interdisciplinary engagement with finance but also as a reversal through which derivative logic itself is used as a theory reflecting back on the social, which allows the authors to arrive at new and curious insights into their ‘native’ disciplines. The book strikes a rare balance as a critical engagement with finance and derivatives while at the same time not simply dismissing these as just another element of ‘evil capitalism.’”
Journal of Economic Literature
"Eight papers present the case for an integration of the social and technical understanding of derivative finance within a single analytic and interpretive frame and use what was disclosed by the global financial crisis to show how technical knowledge of derivative finance can create a single coherent interpretive and analytic language of human possibility and well-being."
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