Eschewing explanations that seek to blame the profligate consumer or unworthy mortgage borrower, Lieber lays the blame squarely with the ‘dark market’ of derivative trading, whose ‘heart of darkness’ once beat vigorously in the now perhaps chastened, and very much bailed out, AIG Financial Products (their London office in particular). Lieber then proceeds to unpick in some detail some of the simply incomprehensible sums that have been poured into this and other very thirsty wells, as well as the complicities of and repeated obfuscations by the relevant regulatory bodies.

The article is carefully researched and worth reading, but I want to  use it as a spring board for some other thoughts, centred around Lieber’s allusion to Joseph Conrad’s novel, and the tale of Marlow’s ill-fated journey up the river Congo to locate the possibly insane Kurtz. The analogy certainly is resonant, perhaps echoing our own various layman’s attempts to shed light on a trade that, in some quarters at least, and with 20:20 hindsight glasses strapped firmly into place, is being branded a form of economic madness. That makes us, and Lieber, intrepid, truth-seeking Marlows, and the derivatives, the London offices, the ‘quants’ a kind of assembled incarnation of the unfathomable, compelling, disturbing, Kurtz/Congolese jungle hybrid with which the book closes.

But maybe we are also becoming Conrads? I suspect there are dangers in transforming the considerable opacities with which investigative researchers are confronted when following money-trails, into contemporary versions of Conrad’s orientalist Victorian vision, where the unknown and the alien becomes a sink for our fears, hopes and desires, obscuring some of the insights that can be gleaned by visiting the jungle and simply watching. In other words, there is a danger of obscuring the possibility of insights generated by careful empirical work (or indeed, imaginative work – sticking with the literary theme, I’m thinking of the space opened up by Jean Rhys in her postcolonial reinvention of Jane Eyre’s lady in the attic in The Wide Sargasso Sea).

This is all the more important, because just this sort of careful economic anthropology has been, and is being done on derivative markets. In their expanded analysis on Socializing Finance of findings from a recent paper, Daniel Beunza and David Stark provide some very different accounts of the causes of the contemporary financial crisis: like others before them, they focus on the models that traders use to make their decisions. But rather than debating their accuracy, or correspondences to an economic reality, with the underlying assumption that more accurate models might mitigate against future crises, they investigate what role might be played by the use of, and dependence on, models themselves. They argue that, when you sit and watch, trader’s can not only be wholly aware of the limits of their models, but that such circumspection can be productive and built into the practice of successful trading. In other words, that the current financial crisis is rooted less in doubtful models, than the lack of realisation of the productive potential of doubt itself. This is certainly an interesting proposal, especially in the context of the various doubt-busting exercises that are being attempted in governments’ attempts to get money moving again. Given the apparent paucity of success stories, perhaps it’s time governments took a second look at their models…