This text is the preface of a book of photographs will be exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Geneva in June
In July 2002, I was rowing to make intelligible the result of my investigations into the functioning of the financial world. I was tired of hearing that what I wrote was complicated. I remember when the road was thinning. I went on vacation. The car was full of screaming children. I was driving with his head in the book I had left in the yard, tucking me, zigzagging between the first campers to arrive at the toll stations, slowing down at the sight of a biker or a radar. It spoke to me, but I did not answer. I was looking for a metaphor that would make everyone agree. Me being overtaken by a big sedan registered in Switzerland, to which hung a trailer, I had an illumination. The sedan had disappeared in the blind spot of my mirror. I thought that the financial world functioned as a highway system. With toll stations, tapes of his judgments, his cars, his trailer, license plates, its police, thieves and its routes.
A vehicle overtaking another and remains, with its constant speed, hidden in the blind spot mirrors. It will be gone. He has actually gone from your field of vision, before reappearing as if by magic, a few seconds later. It is the same with money transfers and values. Mountains of yen, euros, rubles or dollars, bundles of stocks and bonds are in sight in trailers large cars on the highways of finance. We do not see them, because we do not want to see them.
I have long believed that it was impossible to trace a transfer as soon as he crossed the border of a pays.Trop traffic. Too much speed. Too many lies. No memory. My discovery of the role played by international clearing Clearstream and Euroclear and society routing financial Swift helped me understand how my money and representations of capitalism were wrong. Not only the financial transactions were recorded, but the information was centralized and stored in huge yards finance. Between them, these three companies octopus with branches and customers around the world, have become in two decades, thanks to the microchip and advances in information technology, the essential tools of globalization. Traffic managers in the global village. Transport companies of financial capitalism. Its cash registers. Its gasoline pumps. Its control towers. His black boxes, too. All banks in the world, but also multinational corporations and more disorders are permanently connected to their networks and use it to transfer, sell, buy, cheat, steal, hide. Compete. Disappear.
Swift simply record and transmit orders for transfer of banks to banks. You are in Italy, you rent a car: the lessor, to your credit card in his camera, use the Swift network to which subscriber is necessarily your bank to debit your account in Normandy or on a lagoon of St. Barts. Clearstream and Euroclear are responsible for organizing cross-border trading of stocks and bonds, to guarantee the solvency of customers in the markets, facilitate trade and global capital to offset them. They can transfer the cash, but they are mainly responsible for turning your assets into investments. They make the trip and keep them in their huge car parks. They are paid for these services. A commission on each pass and rent for each garage.
Bankers and their computer play on the pace of trade and technology on our ignorance of trips for us bank swindle. They use the blind spots in the system of subtle transformation tools and transfer values. They can go so fast in trade that you can not follow them. They may mask the numbers of plates or some mix of trailers and cars at the toll so that the travel is, we no longer know very well who owns what. And where all this file.
Everything is done by sets of accounting records. The computer of Clearstream or Euroclear will offset losses and gains of each other. Ass screwed into their seats in Luxembourg or Brussels, they travel to the four corners of the planet. We pay one million francs in his bank branch in Monaco. Time to return the money has already gone into an account in Paris, returned as an investment in Jersey. The motorway networks are interconnected. Transfer orders spin via cables that connect computers that connect hard drives that connect electronic safes. In London, Frankfurt and Geneva, operators have an eye on the queue. They leave Swift borrow a bridge that leads them in Clearstream, which then makes another return to Euroclear. Sometimes they demand even more speed or discretion for certain transfers. They then use alternative routes. They leave the stream and go invisible. They play on the plate numbers, vehicle change, sow their pursuers. They can also erase the traces of certain passages. Whole mass of money or valuables disappear and reappear a different form later. Beyond the sea, in a tax haven off the coast.
Tax havens are decoys, ghost towns in the end. No need to go and seek what can not find it. The financial vehicles have, somehow, simulated a deposit. Financial information is stored and accessible in the electronic archive of yards of capitalism that becomes more and more clandestine. Always Clearstream and Euroclear. The first has its headquarters in a tax haven. Luxembourg. Ie a place where no independent judge will never set foot. The loop is well fastened.
The proliferation of speed cameras on French motorways has reduced dramatically speeding and fatal accidents. Fear of the fine and the policeman played. The proliferation of alternative routes, traffic plates and vehicles exceeding the speed limit have transformed into a jungle inaccessible to the motorway network financially. Capitalism is not crazy, as some predict, it became uncontrollable.
In 2002, while the Swiss big sedan passed me, I had this vision. We were millions of us drag types of congestion in toll stations, flashed by radar, controlled by the police. Above our heads, stealing cars driven by smiling ghosts like vampires.
DR
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