Furthermore, corporations in the United States and elsewhere seem increasingly to be becoming "financialized" in a sense additional to that of marketvalue maximization. The use of derivatives to manage financial risks such as exchange-rate and interest-rate fluctuations is established, but corporations now also have available to them derivatives of a growing range of physical substances and processes: for example, oil and gasoline derivatives, natural gas derivatives, even weather derivatives. … Derivatives of this kind allow risks that traditionally had to be managed by physical or organizational means to be hedged financially. Oil companies, for example, traditionally sought to control risk by vertical integration-ownership of an entire supply chain from oil fields, through transportation and refining, and into retail but the availability of oil and gasoline derivatives offers another route to the same goal (Merton 1998, p. 59).

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, loc. 1178