Paul Virilio Quotes
The globally constituted accident can be compared to what people who work at the stock exchange call 'systemic risk'.
Virilio, Paul. "The Kosovo War Took Place in Orbital Space: Paul Virilio in Conversation with John Armitage." CTheory, vol. 23, no. 3, 2000.
The Meltdown of 2008 and Great Recession that it caused
She had warned about the unregulated derivatives 10 years earlier, but to no avail. See {637987}. Then when she had been proven prescient in the Meltdown of 2008, Congress was more interested in how she thought they could prevent future problems with derivatives. Some were adopted but not all. The financial institutions claimed that they needed derivatives to hedge positions and hence “stabilize” the system. Of the members of Congress who voted on this issue, almost none understood derivatives and credit default swaps were and how they worked. But some were sure they were bad, and others were sure that they were necessary for stability. Derivatives can, and did, get so complicated that the people who originally created them sometimes cannot tell whether they are at risk or not. Even computer cannot calculate the value and risks of these instruments because the values and risks depend on what happens to other companies or instruments which themselves have derivatives insuring them. See {620038} for a good description of the difficulty.
Despite this warning, and the hundreds of billions of dollars of people’s money that was lost on derivatives, and recommendations for not allowing derivatives to bought or sold by institutions who invest the public’s money, derivatives were not outlawed by Congress in its efforts to reregulate the financial industry.
U. S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers called Rajan a “Luddite” for this view, but what Rajan observed and predicted was exactly what happened in the Meltdown of 2008 which led to the Great Recession. Rajan was one of the few economists to call this right. Several, invested their own money assuming a crash and made billions. Most, like Summers and the Federal Reserve Chairmen in retrospect admitted that they missed the signs and didn’t connect the dots. See {637168}, {637987}, and {620038}
Paul Virilio was a French cultural theorist, urbanist, and aesthetic philosopher. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military.
