Tag: John Lanchester
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The weird world of high-frequency trading
There’s another fantastic John Lanchester essay in the London Review of Books. This one reviews Flash Boys by Michael Lewis, an expose of high frequency trading that was followed by an FBI investigation into this practice the day after the book’s release (though the FBI deny the connection). I’d read about algorithmic trading in the past and found it […]
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“When I first read Foucault’s account of the panopticon. I thought it was brilliant but overheated. Now, it actually seems like somebody’s plan”
An absolute must read essay in the Guardian by the novelist John Lanchester who was given access to the GCHQ files by the Guardian: The totalitarian state in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four would need no broader legal justification than that: it really does allow a government to do anything it likes. It was at this point […]
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So what the hell is ‘quantitative easing’?
For a long time John Lanchester’s coverage of the financial crisis has been the best thing about the London Review of Books. Yet even by his own high standards, his most recent essay is spectacularly good: It’s done so through quantitative easing, which involves buying back its own bonds using money that doesn’t actually exist. […]
Mark Carrigan 