It was one thing to reduce the tortured history of finance to a science-fiction narrative of the technological sublime; it has been quite another to turn it into the ne plus ultra of the full-spectrum neoliberal response to the crisis. As in the case of geoengineering, it has been necessary to recruit scientists who concede that they will never rectify the underlying crisis debility, so they must turn their efforts instead to fashioning Band-Aids to treat the symptoms. As the economist Paul Romer is reported to have said, "Every decade or so, any finite system of financial regulation will lead to a systemic financial crisis." Never mind the history of the agent practices or the neoliberal capture of politics (or economic history, for that matter); the market will always periodically experience indigestion. Options, CDOs-squared, credit default swaps, high-frequency trading, dark pools, repo, rehypothecation, shadow banking, SIVs: you can't hold back the ocean. Financial complexification is as inevitable as the tides. If nature will never be thoroughly tamed, then it behooves us to at least develop instrumentalities to ride its chaotic complexity. And it follows that the response to apparent market glitches is to double down with even more markets.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 958