The fluffiness of this article reminds me of a passage from "Debt, The First 5,000 years" by John Graeber: > For years, everyone had been hearing of a whole ho

The fluffiness of this article reminds me of a passage from "Debt, The First 5,000 years" by John Graeber: > For years, everyone had been hearing of a whole host of new, ultrasophisticated financial innovations: credit and commodity derivatives, collateralized mortgage obligation derivatives, hybrid securities, debt swaps, and so on. These new derivative markets were so incredibly sophisticated, that-according to one persistent story-a prominent investment house had to employ astrophysicists to run trading programs... I well remember going to conferences in 2006 and 2007 where trendy social theorists presented papers arguing that these new forms of securitization, linked to new information technologies, heralded a looming transformation in the very nature of time, possibly reality itself. I remember thinking: "Suckers!" And so they were.