Global Finance, Precarious Destinies
Tarot (del presente-por-venir) de Barcelona & Cloud Gate & Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium
On AT&T Plaza in Chicago’s Millennium Park stands a giant stainless steel sculpture in the shape of an indented ellipsoid, 66 feet long, 33 feet high, weighing 110 tons and glistening in the sun like a drop of liquid mercury. Entitled Cloud Gate by its creator, the British artist Anish Kapoor, and nicknamed “the Bean” by locals, it cost 11.5 million dollars and it immediately became what it was intended to be, an urban attraction photographed by endless tourists, the world-renowned symbol of a creative city. Stand below the arching mass of the sculpture and gaze upwards at the omphalos or navel: your body multiplies into drunken curves, improbably fat and impossibly thin, like in a funhouse mirror. Look back at the sculpture from a few steps away: your diminutive image is crowned by a ring of skyscrapers, their outlines etched against a blue horizon.
Returning home from a recent trip to Detroit and a string of other half-devastated cities, I realized viscerally what I knew intellectually: that Chicago is the incomparable winner of the region, the Midwestern capital of the global economy. It’s the city that pioneered both commodity and financial futures, and after a recent round of mergers it is now home to the world’s largest futures and options market, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group. The highest level knowledge workers are making tremendous amounts of money in this city. Yet our neighborhood just a few miles from the lakeshore is full of boarded-up houses and lives that have been foreclosed by the crisis. Twenty percent of the city’s inhabitants have fallen beneath the poverty line and a quarter of the population has no health insurance. The municipal housing projects have been destroyed for private development and over thirty percent of the high school students will not graduate.1 On a sunny day you can see the bright blue sky through the rust-eaten girders of the elevated transport system.
This essay inquires into the workings – and indeed, the work force – of a variety of capitalism that has spread outwards from its Anglo-American core to reshape the entire planet. At the center of contemporary capitalism is a set of financial instruments called derivatives, and a group of people called traders. The text draws links between their highly abstract formulas and the aesthetics of lived experience in the world’s major cities. For that it begins not with the azure sky, but with the curve of a dark horizon.












art students in Athens, December 2008