"Melting Into Air," from The New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/11/10/081110crat_atlarge_lanchester?currentPage=3

The two best parts of this article:

1. Warren Buffett on the absurdity of derivatives: "The range of derivatives contracts is limited only by the imagination of man (or sometimes, so it seems, madmen).... Say you want to write a contract speculating on the number of twins to be born in Nebraska in 2020. No problem—at a price, you will easily find an obliging counterparty."

2. The writer, John Lanchester, on the parallel between the financial crisis and postmodernism: "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, evokes the elusive nature of meaning in deconstructionism. 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."