I.O.U. Quotes

“The economic metaphor came to be applied to every aspect of modern life, especially the areas where it simply didn't belong. In fields such as education, equality of opportunity, health, employee's rights, the social contract and culture, the first conversation to happen should be about values and principles; then you have the conversation about costs, and what you as a society can afford.”
― John Lanchester, I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay

“The credit crunch was based on a climate (the post-Cold War victory party of free-market capitalism), a problem (the sub-prime mortgages), a mistake (the mathematical models of risk) and a failure, that of the regulators.”
― John Lanchester, Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay

“If the invention of derivatives was the financial world's modernist dawn, the current crisis is unsettlingly like the birth of postmodernism. For anyone who studied literature in college in the past few decades, there is a weird familiarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of finance capital, parallels the elusive nature of meaning in deconstrucitonism. According to Jacques Derrida, the doyen of the school, meaning can never be precisely located; instead, it is always 'deferred,' moved elsewhere, located in other meanings, which refer and defer to other meanings—a snake permanently and necessarily eating its own tail. This process is fluid and constant, but at moments the perpetual process of deferral stalls and collapses in on itself. Derrida called this moment an 'aporia,' from a Greek term meaning 'impasse.' There is something both amusing and appalling about seeing his theories acted out in the world markets to such cataclysmic effect.”
― John Lanchester, I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay

“of seatbelts as an opportunity to take up drunk-driving.”
― John Lanchester, Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay

“It’s as if people used the invention”
― John Lanchester, Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay

“How does the industry seek to master the risks? Through mathematics. The common-sense version of what sophisticated investors do is diversification, a technique so old it’s mentioned in the Talmud, where the strategy advocated is to have a third of your assets in trade, a third in cash and a third in land.”
― John Lanchester, Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay

“As so often with the ideologically committed free marketer, there is no sense that he's actually thinking about what he's saying; he's merely adumbrating arguments towards a conclusion he reached in advance.”
― John Lanchester, I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay

“Customers deposit money in a bank for interest; the bank lends that money to other people at a higher rate of interest. This isn't glamorous or interesting, but then banking is not supposed to resemble base jumping or hip-hop.”
― John Lanchester, I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay