The transformation that has happened in the era of financialization has had little to do with the needs of ordinary business and ordinary people. Financial cheerleaders would like us to believe that Wall Street is the wealthy goose that lays America’s golden eggs. The finance curse shows it to be a different bird: a cuckoo in the nest that is crowding out other parts of the economy.
We all need finance. We need it to pay our bills, to help us save for retirement, to redirect our savings to businesses so they can invest, to insure us against unforeseen calamities, and also sometimes for speculators to sniff out new investment opportunities in our economy. We need finance, but the measure of its contribution to our economy isn’t whether it creates billionaires and big profits, but whether it provides useful services to us at a reasonable cost. Imagine if telephone companies suddenly became insanely profitable and began churning out lots of billionaires, and telephony grew to dwarf every other economic sector—yet our phone calls were still crackly and expensive and the service unreliable. We’d soon smell a rat. All this wealth is a sign of sickness, not health.
To unpack the idea of the finance curse, we’ll go on a century-long journey that spans the globe, from the era of robber barons in the early twentieth century, to the City of London as it rediscovered a role for itself after the fall of the British Empire as a crime-infested, deregulated offshore playground for Wall Street in the 1950s, to the birth of modern tax havens in the Caribbean in the 1960s, to the myth of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy (contrary to received wisdom, it wasn’t based on low corporate taxes), to the shocking truths about London’s role in generating the global financial crisis—something that parochial Americans have spent too long ignoring. After the crisis we travel to South Dakota and the peculiar world of wealth managers, then follow twisting corporate trails leading from a shattered local newspaper in New Jersey up to the glittering offices of secretive private equity titans and hedge fund moguls in Manhattan, and from there to Iowa’s bitter, financialized, hog farming communities. And we will see how, all along the way, evidence has been beaten, twisted, and abused to perpetrate a great hoax upon the public, persuading us that all this activity is normal, necessary, and even a good thing. It is anything but.
Some economists behave like aliens who sit in spaceships high above Earth, watching us through powerful telescopes. They record all the scurrying back and forth, then build theories and mathematical models about what we’re up to, without properly accounting for folly, cruelty, sex, friendship, patriotism, credulity, and the general rough-and-tumble of our crazy, emotional lives.
One economist who perceived both the economic behavior and the emotional complexity, and can consequently help us understand the finance curse, was an early-twentieth-century Norwegian American called Thorstein Veblen, an extraterrestrial of a different kind. An unlikely figure, he perched himself outside the normal range of human experience, and this enabled him to sit far enough back from humanity to observe our foibles clearly, so he could use them as a starting point for properly understanding the world of money and business. Veblen rebelled against the conventional wisdom. He has been called an American Karl Marx and the Charles Darwin of economics, but in truth his varied output is too diverse and weird to categorize. Yet his nuanced understanding of messy human behavior is exactly what makes his ideas so remarkable—and useful. By linking economics with uglier truths about how we as humans really behave and think, he discerned many of the deepest principles that underpin the finance curse.
Veblen was an economist, sociologist, womanizer, and misfit. He made his own furniture but didn’t make his bed in the morning, and he would let his dishes pile up in tottering heaps before washing them all in a barrel with a hose. It is said he once borrowed a sack from a neighbor just so that he could return it with a hornet’s nest inside. In his florid, peculiar writing style he described religion as “the fabrication of vendible imponderables in the nth dimension,” the main religious denominations as “chain stores,” and their individual churches as “retail outlets.” At the fiercely religious Carleton College in Minnesota he poked fun at mathematical economics by asking a student to calculate the value of her church to her in kegs of beer, and he provoked uproar with a speech entitled “A Plea for Cannibalism.” A lank-haired weirdo genius, he observed society unencumbered by strictures of religion, economic conventions, or the petty airs and graces of the early twentieth century that kept the grubby workers down and the landed gentry in their rightful place. His apartness let him see things others couldn’t and helped him say the unsayable.
Born to Norwegian immigrant parents in rural Wisconsin in 1857, Veblen was the sixth and the smartest of twelve children. The farmstead where he grew up was so isolated that when he left he was, as one historian put it, “emigrating to America.” His brilliance took him from these humble beginnings to Yale, where he got a PhD in 1884, before going to ground and mooching around listlessly for several years. “He read and loafed,” his brother remembered, “and the next day he loafed and read.” Some said he was unemployable because he hated Christianity or because he had a prejudice against Norwegians. His oddball, sardonic wit surely didn’t help, nor did his open contempt for economists and other academics. He clashed repeatedly with university authorities but also relished scholarly cut and thrust, calling himself “a disturber of the intellectual peace” and “a wanderer in the intellectual no-man’s land.”1
It wasn’t all solitude, though. He was later ejected from the University of Chicago for marital infidelities with colleagues and students. As one story goes, the dean summoned Veblen into his office in 1905 for a chat.
DEAN: We have a problem with the faculty wives.
VEBLEN: Oh yes, I know. They’re terrible. I’ve had them all.2
Veblen’s womanizing prowess wasn’t due to his looks. Longish hair was plastered down on either side of a center part; bushy eyebrows and a roughly cut mustache and beard suggested he hadn’t tried very hard to discard his Norwegian peasant-farmer upbringing. One lover apparently described him as a chimpanzee. Others remembered a weird domestic charisma. “Lounging about in his loose dressing gown and looking not nearly as anemic and fragile as in his street clothes, he reminded one, with his drooping moustaches and Nordic features, of nothing so much as a hospitable Viking taking his ease at his own fireside,” a visitor recalled. “At such times, he was at his best, doling out curious information, throwing off a little malicious gossip which, in view of his seclusiveness,