A Recent History of...

CDOs

Fool’s Gold begins in a conference room in Nice in spring 2005. Tett admits that at that point she was baffled by the technical language – ‘Gaussian copula’, ‘attachment point’, ‘delta hedging’ – used by the participants. However, before joining the FT she had conducted fieldwork in Soviet Tajikistan for a PhD in social anthropology, and the ethnographer in her was now reawakened. The conference reminded her of a Tajik wedding. Those attending it were forging social links and celebrating a tacit world-view – in this case, one in which ‘it was perfectly valid to discuss money in abstract, mathematical, ultra-complex terms, without any reference to tangible human beings.’

"I don't know," she said rather artlessly, hinting at a personal depth that is perhaps too painful to understand.

Future Sublime

A Review of "To-Day and To-Morrow"

Most of the authors were British, but covered world civilization, culture and history, and world politics. They were largely experts in their fields, rather than men and women of letters. But in trying to visualize the future they found themselves writing fiction, and often science fiction, in the manner of H. G. Wells, to whom many of them inevitably refer. Their futurology thus represents another kind of interface between science and humanities, in that it can be seen as apply-inthe methods of speculative fiction to scientific or sociological fact.

A deeper look into Eileen Chang through Roland Soong