Predatory Formations Dressed in Wall Street Suits and Algorithmic Math

• In Event: 3567 - Financial Crisis and the City: A Transnational Perspective

Abstract

This article examines how assemblages of complex types of knowledge and technologies—including
algorithmic mathematics, law and accounting, and high-level logistics—have generated complex
predatory formations. The complexity of these formations tends to camouflage their predatory character.
Further, such formations are systemic in nature. They are not produced by an elementary seizure of
power. Predatory formations are often beyond the reach of ordinary policy responses, in good part
because they tend to assemble elements of separate domains into novel configurations. The focus here
is on one of the more powerful and complex predatory formations, (high) finance. And the effort is to
explain how even the most sophisticated financial instruments require certain elementary and brutal
steps, resulting in highly degraded socio-economic outcomes. The sub-prime mortgage developed in
the early 2000s differentiates itself from the original 1970s concept in that its aim was not to enable
access to housing. Its aim was and is to use the actual physical good (the house) to develop an assetbacked
security for the financial system itself.

Author

• Saskia Sassen, Columbia University