Penn Program on Democracy, Constitutionalism and Citizenship; Corporations & Citizenship Series:

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

Speaker: Hirokazu Miyazaki, Cornell University

The global financial crisis stemming from the collapse of the U.S. subprimemortgage markets has had a profound effect on financial professionals and theirengagement with their financial expertise worldwide. For example, there iswidespread sentiment among Japanese financial market professionals that the eraof finance in which financial professionals and their expertise are highlyvalued has ended. On the one hand, it is clear that the kind of innovation andintellectual excitement that led to the expansion of credit derivatives isunlikely to gain momentum again in the near future. On the other hand, thecurrent acute sense of profound uncertainty facing Japan and elsewhere seems todemand precisely the kind of technique for embracing and dealing withuncertainty that finance has long ostensibly represented. In this paper, Ioffer an ethnographic glimpse into this predicament confronting globalfinancial market professionals in Japanese financial market specialists’competing responses to the crisis of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) inthe aftermath of the nuclear power plant accident that followed the massiveearthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. The focus of my analysis is thetension between the collective market effort to protect TEPCO and its bondholders in which TEPCO was deemed “too big to fail,” in the names of victims ofthe accident as well as of the Japanese financial system, and the sporadiceffort to arbitrage TEPCO bonds, in the name of reforming the Japanesefinancial system altogether. What was striking was the way both sides shareddeep skepticism about the efficacy and validity of their financial expertiseand resignation that TEPCO, and the entire national economy, would certainlysink, albeit preferably slowly. The paper examines financial marketprofessionals’ unexpected agreement to embrace the end of finance and itsimplications for the critique of capitalism. 

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