The Displaced World of Risk Management: Covert Enchantment in a Calculative World

The financial industry gets more and more attention for the risks inherent to its business. The crash of the dot.com bubble affected many non-professional investors and made them aware that profits are not guaranteed, leading to feelings of betrayal on the part of this public. When labelling hedge fund investors ‘locusts’, implying that they ravenously fall upon the country, Franz Müntefering, chairman of the Social Democrats in Germany in 2005, was simply giving expression to a widespread feeling of the public concerning globalized investment methods; after all, it was election time. It is, nonetheless, also a sign of a changing attitude to risk. The public no longer accepts the lack of transparency anymore. It feels threatened by the possible consequences of realized risks. Coining the term ‘Casino Capitalism’ to describe recent developments in financial markets, Strange (1986) highlights the fact that trading is increasingly moving away from deals linked directly to an underlying business toward deals where the original business becomes a distant referent, as in the case of derivatives. This trend leaves the public with the impression that something profoundly uncontrollable is happening. Since the publication of Strange’s book, we have witnessed an intensification of this phenomenon in terms of: ‘the sheer size of these markets, the volumes traded, the variety of possible deals to be done, the number of new financial centers, the men and women employed directly or indirectly in the business of international finance, including the victims, the involuntary gamblers in the casino’ (Strange, 1998, p. 9).