skandalon

Undoubtedly gambling, like other addictions, depends on a complicated mixture of brain chemistry, environment and socialisation. Howard Shaffer, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, notes that the rate of pathological gambling in America has remained relatively constant for the past 35 years, despite a huge expansion in the opportunities on offer. There was a spike in the late 1990s but levels have dropped since then. Dr Shaffer draws a parallel with a classic virus-infection curve: high at the beginning as those most susceptible fall ill, but gradually tailing off as people adapt.

✖ Via The Economist: “The risk instinct. Why do people bet?” June 8th, 2010

• Aug 04, 2010 link notes tagged: game gambling money risk loss sociology psychiatry pathology evolution addiction

I thought all these other people. I thought how did they get to be who they are. It’s banks and car parks. It’s airline tickets in their computers. It’s restaurants filled with people talking. It’s people signing the merchant copy. It’s people taking the merchant copy out of the leather folder and then signing it and separating the merchant copy from the customer copy and putting their credit card in their wallet. This alone could do it.

✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Scribner, 2003, p. 195

Previously on Skandalon: Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo

• Jul 25, 2010 link notes tagged: art novel book author DeLillo Cosmopolis consumption customer money economy credit debt identity existence reality being

Mais l’accusation a buté sur le pourquoi des actes de celui qui, comme l’avait indiqué à l’audience le témoin Jean-Pierre Mustier, « vivra et mourra comme étant le trader au monde ayant fait perdre le plus d’argent à sa banque ». « Fou ou incompétent?” a demandé Jean-Michel Aldebert. Philippe Bourion avait évoqué une autre hypothèse: celle d’une « variante financière du bovarysme, qui consiste à se voir autrement que l’on est, à se donner des sensations fortes”. “Il y aura un avant et un après Kerviel dans les banques”, a affirmé le procureur, tout en s’interrogeant sur la capacité du système à lutter contre un nouveau « génie dévastateur ».

✖ Via Le Monde: “Me Metzner: “Qui a fabriqué Jérôme Kerviel”?”, Chroniques Judiciaires, by Pascale Robert Diard, June 25th, 2010

• Jul 21, 2010 link notes tagged: art novel author pathology fantasy knowledge reality economy lost loser representation anxiety critic desire Kerviel destruction money bank capitalism

By 10am it emerged that Mr Perkins had single-handedly moved the global price of oil to an eight-month high during a “drunken blackout”. Prices leapt by more than $1.50 a barrel in under half an hour at around 2am – the kind of sharp swing caused by events of geo-political significance. Ten times the usual volume of futures contracts changed hands in just one hour.

✖ Via Telegraph.co.uk: “How a broker spent $520m in a drunken stupor and moved the global oil price” by Rowena Mason, June 30th, 2010

• Jun 30, 2010 link notes tagged: communication technology economy finance lost loser money oil broker alcohol chaos

Anyway, not feeling too guilty about this, the real purpose of my job is to make capital markets more efficient and ultimately provide the U.S. consumer with more efficient ways to leverage and finance himself, so there is a humble, noble and ethical reason for my job ;) amazing how good I am in convincing myself !!!

✖ Via Reuters: “Goldman’s “Fabulous” Fab’s conflicted love letters” by Steve Eder and Karey Wutkowski, Apr 25, 2010

Here are some more excerpts from Fabrice Tourre’s email:

“The SEC’s complaint only included Tourre referring to himself as “fabulous Fab” and talking about “standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstrosities!!!”

“When I think that I had some input into the creation of this product (which by the way is a product of pure intellectual masturbation, the type of thing which you invent telling yourself: “Well, what if we created a “thing”, which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?”) it sickens the heart to see it shot down in mid-flight… It’s a little like Frankenstein turning against his own investor ;)”

Fabrice Tourre

” is a London-based Executive Director at Goldman Sachs who was charged by the SEC on 16 April 2010 in a $1 billion landmark fraud case.” (wikipedia)

You may remember Jerome Kerviel’s case.

• Apr 27, 2010 link notes tagged: technology economy capital capitalism bank money news America fraud destruction lost loser

In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automated teller machine to check my balance. I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. The system hardware, the mainframe sitting in a locked room in some distant city. What a pleasing interaction. I sensed something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed. A deranged person was escorted from the bank by two armed guards. The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now. The networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies.

✖ Via White Noise by Don DeLillo, Penguin Books, [1985]1986, p. 46

White Noise won the National Book Award in 1985. Learn more about it on Wikipedia.

• Mar 17, 2010 link notes reblogged from circuitry [via] tagged: art communication technology machine computer network interaction design user interface money ATM DeLillo author book lost system

This movement of analytic abstraction in the circulation of arbitrary signs is quite parallel to that within which money is constituted. Money replaces things by their signs, not only within a society but from one culture to another, or from one economic organization to another. That is why the alphabet is commercial, a trader. It must be understood within the monetary moment of economic rationality. The critical description of money is the faithful reflection of the discourse on writing. In both cases an anonymous supplement is substituted for the thing. Just as the concept retains only the comparable element of diverse things, just as money gives the “common measure” to incommensurable objetcs in order to constitute them into merchandise, so alphabetic writing transcribes heterogeneous signifieds within a system of arbitrary and common signifiers: the living languages. It thus opens an aggression against the life that it makes circulate. If “the sign has led to the neglect of the thing signified,” as Emile says speaking of money, then the forgetfulness of things is greatest in the usage of those perfectly abstract and arbitrary signs that are money and phonetic writing.

✖ Via Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, JHU Press, [1967]1998, p. 300 (French : éd. Minuit, Paris, 1967, p. 424-425).

• Jun 03, 2009 link notes tagged: philosophy language book author money capitalism sign

Money then serves as a measure which makes things commensurable and so reduces them to equality. If there were no exchange there would be no association, and there can be no exchange without equality, and no equality without commensurability. Though therefore it is impossible for things so different to become commensurable in the strict sense,our demand furnishes a sufficiently accurate common measure for practical purposes. [15] There must therefore be some one standard, and this accepted by agreement (which is why it is called nomisma, customary currency); for such a standard makes all things commensurable, since all things can be measured by money.

✖ Via Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book V, chap. V, §14-15 (1133b1). Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 19, translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1934.

• Jun 03, 2009 link notes tagged: book philosophy money capitalism sign language