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Vincent Antonin Lépinay

Codes of Finance: Engineering Derivatives in a Global Bank 1st Edition

by Vincent Antonin Lépinay (Author)

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A behind-the-scenes account of the derivatives business at a major investment bank

The financial industry's invention of complex products such as credit default swaps and other derivatives has been widely blamed for triggering the global financial crisis of 2008. In Codes of Finance, Vincent Antonin Lépinay, a former employee of one of the world’s leading investment banks, takes readers behind the scenes of the equity derivatives business at the bank before the crisis, providing a detailed firsthand account of the creation, marketing, selling, accounting, and management of these financial instruments―and of how they ultimately created havoc inside and outside the bank.

ISBN-10

0691151504
ISBN-13

978-0691151502
Edition

1st
Publisher

Princeton University Press
Publication date

August 28, 2011
Language

English
Dimensions

6.4 x 1.1 x 9.3 inches
Print length

312 pages
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"The first in-depth anthropological study of how banks invent new financial products. . . . Lépinay spent nearly two years in a huge French bank . . . And his study is both highly revealing and slightly farcical." ― The Guardian

Review

"Codes of Finance is an unusual, provocative, and compelling account of today's structured financial products, from their inception at the desks and computer screens of financial engineers through their evolving agency in the world of trading, to their marketing, sale, and explosive afterlives. This is a tour de force merging science and technology studies with the new social studies of finance, and essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the codes and pragmatic unfoldings of contemporary financial capitalism."―Bill Maurer, University of California, Irvine

"We have not seen an ethnography like Codes of Finance in a long time. Through the prism of innovative financial services designed in a French bank, Vincent Lépinay asks us to revise our conception of organizations, innovations, profit, and speculation, and makes clear why the issue is not so much how to get rid of derivatives as why we need to understand them."―Michel Callon, école des Mines de Paris

"Investment banks are enormously important, yet few social scientists have been inside them. Lépinay's fine ethnography takes us into trading rooms and back offices, examining machines as well as people, and investigating the variety of specialized languages needed to capture the properties of financial products. His book is a vital introduction to a style of economic sociology very different from that dominant in the Anglo-American world."―Donald MacKenzie, author of An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets

"Codes of Finance sets a new standard for the ethnography of finance. This is the first ethnographic study to focus directly on financial formulas (or "products"), without caricaturing them or domesticating financial reasoning to well-trodden academic debates. It powerfully communicates the detail of financial knowledge―detail about the formulas, their production, and their interpretation by various human and nonhuman actants―from an astonishing range of vantage points within the knowledge production process. The book is a must-read for anthropologists of knowledge and for creative thinkers within the financial markets alike."―Annelise Riles, author of Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets

"In this rich and fascinating ethnography, Vincent Lépinay takes the reader through the front and back offices of derivatives trading. Lépinay understands the codes―the secrets, the software, and the silent frames―of finance. This is must reading for economic sociologists as well as for anyone interested in the forefront of new research on organizations and technology. A wonderful book."―David Stark, author of The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life

"We are the masters of what we create―that is the myth. The reality is that we often do not even understand what we create. As Lépinay shows, this is the case with today's engineered financial products. This book is an important step toward solving the mystery of the lack of mastery in the world of finance."―Bruno Latour, coauthor of Laboratory Life

From the Inside Flap

"Codes of Finance is an unusual, provocative, and compelling account of today's structured financial products, from their inception at the desks and computer screens of financial engineers through their evolving agency in the world of trading, to their marketing, sale, and explosive afterlives. This is a tour de force merging science and technology studies with the new social studies of finance, and essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the codes and pragmatic unfoldings of contemporary financial capitalism."--Bill Maurer, University of California, Irvine

"We have not seen an ethnography like Codes of Finance in a long time. Through the prism of innovative financial services designed in a French bank, Vincent Lépinay asks us to revise our conception of organizations, innovations, profit, and speculation, and makes clear why the issue is not so much how to get rid of derivatives as why we need to understand them."--Michel Callon, école des Mines de Paris

"Investment banks are enormously important, yet few social scientists have been inside them. Lépinay's fine ethnography takes us into trading rooms and back offices, examining machines as well as people, and investigating the variety of specialized languages needed to capture the properties of financial products. His book is a vital introduction to a style of economic sociology very different from that dominant in the Anglo-American world."--Donald MacKenzie, author ofAn Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets

"Codes of Finance sets a new standard for the ethnography of finance. This is the first ethnographic study to focus directly on financial formulas (or "products"), without caricaturing them or domesticating financial reasoning to well-trodden academic debates. It powerfully communicates the detail of financial knowledge--detail about the formulas, their production, and their interpretation by various human and nonhuman actants--from an astonishing range of vantage points within the knowledge production process. The book is a must-read for anthropologists of knowledge and for creative thinkers within the financial markets alike."--Annelise Riles, author ofCollateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets

"In this rich and fascinating ethnography, Vincent Lépinay takes the reader through the front and back offices of derivatives trading. Lépinay understands the codes--the secrets, the software, and the silent frames--of finance. This is must reading for economic sociologists as well as for anyone interested in the forefront of new research on organizations and technology. A wonderful book."--David Stark, author ofThe Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life

"We are the masters of what we create--that is the myth. The reality is that we often do not even understand what we create. As Lépinay shows, this is the case with today's engineered financial products. This book is an important step toward solving the mystery of the lack of mastery in the world of finance."--Bruno Latour, coauthor ofLaboratory Life

From the Back Cover

"Codes of Finance is an unusual, provocative, and compelling account of today's structured financial products, from their inception at the desks and computer screens of financial engineers through their evolving agency in the world of trading, to their marketing, sale, and explosive afterlives. This is a tour de force merging science and technology studies with the new social studies of finance, and essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the codes and pragmatic unfoldings of contemporary financial capitalism."--Bill Maurer, University of California, Irvine

"We have not seen an ethnography like Codes of Finance in a long time. Through the prism of innovative financial services designed in a French bank, Vincent Lépinay asks us to revise our conception of organizations, innovations, profit, and speculation, and makes clear why the issue is not so much how to get rid of derivatives as why we need to understand them."--Michel Callon, école des Mines de Paris

"Investment banks are enormously important, yet few social scientists have been inside them. Lépinay's fine ethnography takes us into trading rooms and back offices, examining machines as well as people, and investigating the variety of specialized languages needed to capture the properties of financial products. His book is a vital introduction to a style of economic sociology very different from that dominant in the Anglo-American world."--Donald MacKenzie, author of An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets

"Codes of Finance sets a new standard for the ethnography of finance. This is the first ethnographic study to focus directly on financial formulas (or "products"), without caricaturing them or domesticating financial reasoning to well-trodden academic debates. It powerfully communicates the detail of financial knowledge--detail about the formulas, their production, and their interpretation by various human and nonhuman actants--from an astonishing range of vantage points within the knowledge production process. The book is a must-read for anthropologists of knowledge and for creative thinkers within the financial markets alike."--Annelise Riles, author of Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets

"In this rich and fascinating ethnography, Vincent Lépinay takes the reader through the front and back offices of derivatives trading. Lépinay understands the codes--the secrets, the software, and the silent frames--of finance. This is must reading for economic sociologists as well as for anyone interested in the forefront of new research on organizations and technology. A wonderful book."--David Stark, author of The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life

"We are the masters of what we create--that is the myth. The reality is that we often do not even understand what we create. As Lépinay shows, this is the case with today's engineered financial products. This book is an important step toward solving the mystery of the lack of mastery in the world of finance."--Bruno Latour, coauthor of Laboratory Life

About the Author

Vincent Antonin Lépinay is associate professor in the sociology department at Sciences Po in Paris. He is also head of the Center for Science and Technology Studies at the European University at St. Petersburg. He is the coauthor (with Bruno Latour) of The Science of Passionate Interests.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Princeton University Press; 1st edition (August 28, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 312 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0691151504
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0691151502
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.19 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.4 x 1.1 x 9.3 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #6,360,171 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #708 in Business Pricing
- #3,843 in Business Finance
- #16,062 in Sociology (Books)

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Philo

Nimble, brilliant, virtuoso performance

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 19, 2014

Verified Purchase

This book has a pretty novel approach of following a financial product around, through all the changes and personnel and firm frameworks that it touches on. This is quite effective.
I wish I could describe this book as well as the author describes countless nuanced things. The author's (and reader's) point of view moves effortlessly (with a grace and brevity of language that is at once business-and-economics-based, yet artful), all around a bank, a certain set of deals, the various participants, and crucial issues that arose as these participants inked deals, sought their own aims, and collided with complex realities. For example, how does a trader (as well as the middle and back office, risk management folks and so on) hedge and otherwise manage a portfolio of deals that shifts constantly across multiple markets of "underlyings" and that the clients can change during the term of the contract? What do the accountants do with this secretive and opaque mass of transactions, and the investors in the company's stock? Who inside the firm has motives to keep their job obscure and opaque when managers, accountants, regulators and others come sniffing around? Who is quick to jump ship for other opportunities? How can a product like this endanger the firm's culture and the firm itself? What about other companies that might be looking to snap up people and parts of this firm? Where are the fault lines where things can break down? The aims and perceptions of each player are mapped lucidly, as well as conflicts and other dynamics that creep up, that can threaten not only individual players but the whole firm. The author describes these abstractions with just the right words and phrases, frequently in the familiar business language, and sometimes with a virtuoso original choice of words/observations. It moves nicely and never feels tedious. My money and time are well spent. The author notes that the details (for example the formulas embedded in the particular derivatives deal) are a bit obsolete and not cutting-edge, yet I feel I got a strong update on a host of issues in modern organizations and finance. (The view stretches into theory-of-the-firm type issues too, Coase and so on. What does the firm keep within its boundaries and how are those firm boundaries challenged by such porous and shifting deals, labor markets, computer systems across the firm, and external challenges such as global competitive shifts and shifts in regulators' tactics?) This is far from dwelling on trivia like coffee break time, as another reviewer claimed.
I have read several other social-sciences books on finance, and this is the best so far, going away.
The author hints that another work is underway on the interface of laws and finance -- I hope the project is going well, and I'll snap it up the moment it is published.
Another reviewer asked, "What is the idea behind writing such books?" Here are a few roles I have that make it valuable and gripping for me: 1) I am an investor wanting a better view (beyond the financial statements), by way of some examples, of the general types of products and deals going on "under the hood" in financial firms. 2) I am a professor in business law who needs to put together and present vignettes to students of teamwork inside modern firms. I also want to be fluent ith the current vocabulary. 3) I am a curious person who takes great pleasure in viewing modern life through the prism of things like derivatives.

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Alex Stewart

Splendid book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 10, 2013

Verified Purchase

I borrow John Van Maanen's accolade: splendid. This book is based on truly participant observation, as the author was a graduate student in mathematical finance who held jobs in three functions of the loosely disguised investment bank. Therefore, he is able to discuss the nature of the financial product he focuses on, and the challenges that the major specialties in the bank (quant, financial engineer, trader, sales) had in coordinating their (mis)understandings. Although the book has implications for investors and for regulators, it strikes me as an exceptionally well done study of the challenges of organizational design for firms with sophisticated financial instruments. That is, the main implications appear to be managerial.
As an aside, as there is another review here with claims at odds with mine, may I refer to the issue of "coffee" that it addresses. With the Kindle edition, I am able to search for all the instances of that term in the book. There are three, and they involve the issue of how the various specialists seek - with very limited time - to gain information from the other specialties. Moreover, these examples are not representative of the style of the book, which is fairly readable but considerably more abstract as a rule. Not that there would be a problem with more such detail, but as noted the author is a mathematical finance scholar who somehow managed to pull off a very well done ethnography.

3 people found this helpful

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trdr555

waste of money

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 9, 2012

Verified Purchase

This book is trash. there is in this nothing about Finance The author is explaining irrelevant things like traders body language, his coffee time etc.
nonsense. What is the idea behind writing such books?

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G Tibbits

Insights into the processes of inventing and managing derivatives made to order

Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on July 20, 2020

Verified Purchase

This book is a case study of a category of products in a French bank. The products are sold as capital protection devices. The study looks at the designers of the products, those interacting with customers, and the back office staff, and those involved in managing the risks during the duration of the products. The dynamics of the interactions of the players, their world views and motivations and the pressures they face are examined.
I found it particularly interesting in terms of the intellectual satisfactions driving many of the actors and the complexity of pricing, managing risks and costing products.

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