The Devil's Derivatives

Acknowledgments

Someone who fits Amartya Sen’s description of a rational fool would be fairly close to a psychopath. The economic world is full of these psychopaths: they are corporations. Corporations don’t have emotions . . . they have PR departments that make up accounts of the company’s motivations to fit a situation . . . Yet we not only survive but prosper in a world where they exist, because there are mechanisms that force them to be open and honest about their own motivation.

—J. Storrs Hall, Beyond AI

This book is the culmination of a fourteen-year career as a financial journalist. Although I began to think about writing it late in 2007, the book’s origins go back to around 2000, after the publication of my first book, Inventing Money ...