Codes of Finance: Engineering Derivatives in a Global Bank

(Hardback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

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. In Codes of Finance, Vincent Antonin Lepinay, a former employee of one of the world's leading investment banks, takes readers behind the scenes of the equity derivatives business at the bank 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.

Reviews

"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

Author Bio

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".