The Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism presents:

"The End of Finance: Financial Market Activism in Post-3/11 Japan"

Hirokazu Miyazaki, Cornell University

The global financial crisis stemming from the collapse of the U.S. subprime mortgage markets has had a profound effect on financial professionals and their engagement with their financial expertise worldwide. For example, there is widespread sentiment among Japanese financial market professionals that the era of finance in which financial professionals and their expertise are highly valued has ended. In this paper, I offer an ethnographic glimpse into this predicament confronting global financial market professionals in Japanese financial market specialists’ competing responses to the crisis of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) in the aftermath of the nuclear power plant accident that followed the massive earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. The paper examines financial market professionals’ unexpected agreement to embrace the end of finance and its implications for the critique of capitalism.