From Arbitrage to the Gift
From Arbitrage to the Gift
This chapter juxtaposes arbitrageurs' engagements with capitalism with recent Japanese academic critiques of global capitalism and identifies the differences between them. It focuses on the economist Katsuhito Iwai's 2000 essay, written in response to the Asian currency crisis and the failure of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management; and on the Marxist literary critic and philosopher Kojin Karatani's 2003 book, Transcritique on Kant and Marx, originally written in Japanese between 1998 and 2000, and their respective commentaries on the global financial crisis of 2007 to 2008. The chapter shows that these critics of capitalism have extended speculation and its accompanied leap of faith as their method and the object of their critique. In contrast, it considers what a theory of capitalism would look like if it were built not on speculation, but on arbitrage. The book concludes with reflections on the relationship between anthropology and finance and its potentially arbitrageable quality.
Keywords: Japanese arbitrageurs, global capitalism, Katsuhito Iwai, Kojin Karatani, 2007 financial crisis
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