I’m currently in the middle of this Foreign Policy profile of Ben Bernanke, who was the Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014 (and played with neurotic curmudgeon by Paul Giamatti in the HBO film Too Big to Fail). A few days ago, Bernanke was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. I’m not in the minds of most Americans (or, really, any other than myself) and can only engage in educated guesswork about the impressions on my generation, but my thinking is that most people my age don’t know Bernanke primarily for his research. We are likely much more familiar with the Bernanke who presided over The Great Recession.1
The Great Recession presented the type narrative of grand political and existential crisis to birth titanic heroes and mythic villains, the Occasion often referred to when we say someone rose or didn’t rise “to the occasion.” Before the dust had settled, before, even, Bernanke had left the post, the word “legacy” was, with reckless abandon, bandied about. And I imagine some looked to Bernanke’s award with consternation. Either he prevented a greater crisis at the time or merely fertilized the soil for the next one already on the horizon.2
Elsewhere, in the UK, the release of the mini-budget, put together by Kwasi Kwarteng and newly-established Tory Prime Minister Liz Truss, provoked so much opprobrium and shock that the pound plummeted to record lows against the dollar.3 As much an exercise in self-harm as any other own goal conservative leadership has performed in the aftermath of Cameron’s apocalyptic Brexit gamble.
Bernanke’s handling of the crisis and the current UK leadership’s paroxysm of conservative fanaticism are hardly analogous (one clearly cast as more magisterial and long-sighted than the other), but in each, the wealthy casino owners and their best and most loyal patrons get out ahead. It’s probably easier for them to get a PS5 too.
The perennial “how does this keep happening” is a question long left to the political scientists and the economists, also the center-right, khaki-wearing, upper-class, autocracy-sympathetic readers of The Economist. But I was a storyteller before I was a PoliSci major. And, now, for better and for worse, I am both.
At the tail end of 2020, my youngest sister got me into this British show on HBOMax called Industry. She knows how much I lust after international TV and film, and probably scented how much I’d vibe with this somewhat impenetrable world of high finance, given my college and post-college proximity to it. I’d never heard of the show, but I’ve long admired the streaming platform’s feel for foreign fare.4
I was enthralled.
Other outlets have discussed the TV-ness of it, calling the first season a cross between Billions and Skins or a Millennial Mad Men. Vanity Fair called the second season the missing link between Euphoria and Succession.5 For many, it was the hedonism of the characters that provided the hook; for others, the Succession-esque backstabbing and double-dealing. Almost universal among drawbacks, though, was the omnipresence and opacity of the show’s financial jargon.
That very same feature of the show, I realized, was the reason I couldn’t stop watching.
If those Market-worshippers for whom The Economist is the scribbled-on tablets brought down from Mount Sinai have a mirror on the political left but still comfortably seated at the Center of Empire, it is us readers of the London Review of Books. It’s true that both publications are large enough and have messy enough editorial histories that divergent viewpoints and a diversity of political persuasion among readership are more present than not, but, well, I much prefer the LRB’s takes on China to The Economist’s. Still, that whole genre of publication6 appeals greatly to me and has, ever since I first unlocked an obsession with longform reportage and analysis in 2011, become the largest (and perhaps most edifying) compliment to my novel-reading. In all of these things, I find myself more educated on a thing than before I read about it. There's an adding-to that happens. I never come away feeling stupider or that I've actually lost Int points. In short, I've learned something.7
That was why all that talk of swaps and trades and positions on Industry so enthralled me. I was learning something.
You mention worldbuilding, and usually the genre that first comes to mind is speculative fiction. People talk about the “worldbuilding in Game of Thrones” or the “worldbuilding in Battlestar Galactica” or the “worldbuilding in Watchmen” or the worldbuilding in, etc. The term comes with magic and/or science attached. Here, there be dragons. Or 80s couture and scary monsters and kids with special abilities. Or underwater cities. Worldbuilding is the Red Wedding and the word “frak.” But it’s also the particular arrangement of and choreography on a trading floor.
Part of the contract with the reader/watcher/listener is an element of trust. Creator says, You may not understand how it all fits together, but we trust you not to poke and prod too much, searching for weak joints. Consumer says, you may not infodump every element of your world onto the page or screen, but we trust you to elaborate clear human stakes in the drama or comedy that is unfolding.
And it’s this that Industry does so very well.
In a season 1 episode, Harper (our protagonist) is in the midst of a trade, and there’s an air of transgression about it. She’s punching above her weight. She’s seized on the opportunity to prove herself by doing something she’s not technically qualified to do, executing a trade with stakes larger, perhaps, than the average watcher can imagine. And so much of the thrill in that scene is simply in watching a line on a graph rise…and rise…and rise until it passes a particular threshold at which Harper’s supposed to close it out. But she lets it keep going. And suddenly, my heart’s in my throat. I’m watching this line and I’m sweating spinal fluid and I’m screaming at the screen for Harper to literally just click her mouse but she can’t let it stop. She’s reached past what she was supposed to do and is aiming for something higher, much higher. She’s aiming for the sun. Then the line drops. Precipitously. And we know, without knowing technically why, that she’s fucked up. Like, gambled it all and lost. And the line keeps going down down down, and the heart that was formerly in my throat is now in my shoes, and I can’t believe Harper didn’t listen to me, and….
I won’t say how the scene ends, but, suffice it to say, Harper’s still working in that bank by the next episode. There are, however, personal consequences for what happened.
If season 1 of the show was the equivalent of Lord Willin’, then season 2 was the transcendent Hell Hath No Fury.
We get another heart-racing trading floor scene with Harper at its center. And this time, with personal stakes crystal clear, it’s like watching the bank shootout scene in Heat. Same fucking energy.
After that episode, I immediately texted a collaborator on a project, and, if I remember correctly, the entire text was a series of exclamation points. My follow-up: “how tf did they do that?”
In early 2010, I wrote an unproduced8 feature script set in the world of global finance. There were sovereign debt crises and a plot involving credit default swaps and a country's doomed attempt at entry into the EU, and, just a few months prior, I knew just about nothing of these things. But I did know what it felt like to leave the relatively cloistered sanctuary of a college campus and step into a financial post-apocalypse where the edifices of economic opportunity are literally mid-collapse all around you. Failing banks in the US, street riots in Greece, Occupy Wall Street, rescinded job offers. I'm convinced everyone who graduated college in the US between 2008 and 2010 and lived to tell the tale deserves a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
What I mean is that, in especially acute fashion, the links between the dark arts of high finance and the felt reality of human beings at the foot of the mountain were made legible. Painfully, dramatically legible. Mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, austerity, bailout. The jargon had somehow along the way fitted flesh and blood and tendons and sinew to its skeleton.
J.C. Chandor’s ridiculously accomplished feature-length debut Margin Call9 came a year after I wrote that finance script and, along with Shame and Bullhead, was my favorite film of the year, Mount Olympus turned into a climate-controlled bank office while we watch the architects of our end at work. The Big Short hit in 2015 and did the same thing, albeit it a bit more manically.10
Now, I’m not talking about the wildly entertaining but Manichean Wall Street and its sequel and Scorsese’s operatic The Wolf of Wall Street where the focus is on the engrossing depravity and money-lust of the villains our society has created. The previously mentioned films and the ones that interest me more deeply are concerned with process. I’m most intrigued by the workings of the watch, less so by who wears it.
But when both are made compelling and made to serve each other, the result is stunning. Though it’s about oil and American imperialism and not about finance, Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana is one of my personal touchstones, and I’ve lost count of how often in my life I return to this scene between Matt Damon and Alexander Siddig. The emotional back and forth is subtle, steely, and all bundled up in geopolitical terms. I’m watching drama. And I’m learning something.
It’s very easy to slide from an appreciation for what some might call academic topics to blanket appeals to “smart” entertainment then to a castigation of current audiences as dumbed down and unsophisticated and needing to be handheld. A slippery, slippery slope. Audiences aren’t dumb or unsophisticated, but somewhere along the art-production pipeline, the idea infiltrated that profit-maximization meant as many eyeballs as possible no matter the cost and that became the imperative. So, write about what the most people will care to tune in to watch. Writing YA, none of my audience was dumb or unsophisticated. Teens presented to me more astute and canny reads of my work than the adults with the microphones and the bullhorns. Yet the command from check-signers can sometimes be “write for as many as possible,” interpreted as “write as simply as you can.” And the command is not simply a stylistic push, but a topical one. “Who’s gonna watch a movie about bankers trying to get rid of toxic assets?” Well, I did. Sure, many watch Billions for the BDSM and the shininess of the actors. And, yes, a fuckton of folks watch Succession for the insults in its caustic, British take on American media and in the hopes of a Tom-Greg kiss. And, sure, many watch Industry for the drugs and the bathroom-sex.
But I like to think that the people writing these things I love so much, creating these things I love so much, things I hope to some day build alongside them, are intent on something just as important and just as simple as entertaining.
That I come away having learned something about something.
Currently reading: Homeland by Fernando Aramburu
Currently listening: La Calin (Callmearco Remix) - Okean Elzi
I was tempted to write “kept the United States economy together during” before I realized that the verdict is much more a matter of political and personal perspective. Maybe he helped you keep your home or your retirement savings. Maybe he cost you your job. Maybe he exhibited a heroic about-face regarding his fiscal policy stance in that moment, or maybe it was the most damning betrayal by an unelected official in modern American history. History has yet to clear away the fog of proximate cause. His “break the glass” quantitive easing program may have prevented the type of disaster we’ve only truly encountered in grayscale or sepia-toned textbook photos, but his policies also left alive, in their lacunae, the very Too Big to Fail problems that acutely instigated the crisis. Derivatives trading and swaps proliferate, even after those very words had, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, the same effect on our ears as “plague of locusts” and “rivers of blood.” Though how much of this is Bernanke’s fault? Whomst among us, in his wake, can really tell the difference between fiscal policy, monetary policy, and financial reform/the regulation of banking activities?
One difference between then and now (at least, for me, personally) is that I recall coming across relatively little analysis and reporting on the effects of the policies of the developed world on the Global South at that time. Of course, there were plenty soon seeing the thread between the bank bailouts and the post-crisis austerity policies that gave rise to populist anger movements like the Tea Party and right-wingers throughout the UK and Europe; but whither Nigeria, whither Venezuela? Whither Angola, whither Argentina? Nowadays, however, more Western outlets are shining light on the effect that the Fed’s current interest rate hikes are having on the financial and political (and ecological) fortunes of the developing world. A stronger dollar is a tightened fist around the treasuries south of the Equator and those east of the Prime Meridian.
Literally the political and market equivalent of the YOU NEED TO LEAVE TikTok sound.
The show that formally dethroned The Americans as my favorite show ever is the Naples-based production Gomorrah. My gateway drug was the Berlin-set 4 Blocks about a Lebanese-German crime family in the city’s Neukölin neighborhood. (I’m also a big fan of Netflix’s Snabba Cash.)
Neat bit of crafted genealogy that means you can experience the whole family tree on one streaming service.
In which I’d include such vastly different siblings as Harper’s, Foreign Policy magazine, The New Yorker, Foreign Affairs, and, on some days, even WIRED.
Another reason I cling so tightly to my longreads and my magazine subscriptions is that when I share a link to one of them, it carries less of the stink of an online endorsement of a single tritely articulated viewpoint on a subject that demands deeper analysis. Instead of “Read this headline,” it’s “Read this whole thing.” Not only that, but “Read this whole thing, and take your time in forming an opinion about it. Please.” I swear, those pieces are playing a Herculean role in maintaining my capacity for a longer attention span.
Sans agents, managers, really the whole apparatus designed to assist one’s entry into the world of film, it was more an intellectual and creative exercise than anything else.
Honestly, the cast is stacked af. Like, what the hell?
This Ryan Gosling Jenga Tower scene is the quintessence of the movie.
Hahaha love this sub headline.