Out of the Pits
Traders and Technology from Chicago to London
From New York to Singapore, from Chicago to London, the trading floors of the world’s financial markets are icons of global capitalism. Images of them are used on the news all the time—traders burying their heads in their hands when the market is down, their arms flailing in a frenzy when fortunes are rising—to convey the current state of the economy. But these marketplaces, and the cultural life that sustains them, are dissolving into the ether of the digital age: powerful financial institutions are shutting down the trading pits, replacing face-to-face exchanges with an electronic network where traders sit, face to screen, finger to mouse, and compete in a global arena made up of digits and charts.
Out of the Pits considers the implications of this sea change for everyone involved, from the traders and brokers to the market as a whole. Caitlin Zaloom takes us down to the floor at the Chicago Board of Trade and into a digital dealing room in the City of London. Drawing on her own firsthand experiences as a clerk and a trader and on her unusual access to these key sites of global finance, she explainshow changes at the world’s leading financial exchanges have transformed economic cultures and the craft of speculation; how people and places are responding to the digital transition; how traders are remaking themselves to compete in the contemporary marketplace; and how brokers, business managers, and software designers are collaborating to build new financial markets.
A penetrating and richly detailed account of how cities, culture, and technology shape everyday life in the new global economy, Out of the Pits will be must reading for business buffs or anyone who has ever wondered how financial markets work.
“Here, in all their garish glory, are the human beings behind our modern god of the market. Immensely consequential and yet somehow mysterious, the arcane world of the trading pits requires an anthropologist of Zaloom’s skill to do it justice.”—Thomas Frank, author of One Market Under God and What’s the Matter with Kansas?
“This portrait of high-flying traders is a superb piece of research, recounted with clarity and wit. But Caitlin Zaloom uses anthropology to do some hard thinking about capitalism. The result is an unsettling portrait of the personal and social costs of the new economy.”—Richard Sennett, The London School of Economics, author of The Corrosion of Character and The Fall of Public Man
“We often think of markets as abstract, mathematized things, but in this excellent book, Caitlin Zaloom vividly reminds us that they’re profoundly social institutions, with their own language, passions, and rituals. For anyone who has ever been intimidated by the mysteries of the financial markets, this is a fine way to make their acquaintance.”— Doug Henwood, author of Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Finance from the Floor
Chapter 1 Materials of the Market
Chapter 2 Trapped in the Pits
Chapter 3 Social Experiments in London Markets
Chapter 4 The Work of Risk
Chapter 5 Economic Men
Chapter 6 The Discipline of the Speculator
Chapter 7 Ambiguous Numbers
Conclusion: Practical Experiments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology
Economics and Business: Economics--Money and Banking
Sociology: Occupations, Professions, Work
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