• Dreiser's Financier among the Risk Professionals
• Jeffory A. Clymer (bio)

In a dramatic scene of stock market panic from Theodore Dreiser's 1912 novel The Financier, protagonist Frank Cowperwood struggles to rescue his crumbling brokerage business not by retrenching or selling stocks but by aggressively taking on more risk. Using borrowed funds, Cowperwood purchases securities worth $60,000 on the Philadelphia stock exchange and "immediately hypothecated them," or put them up as collateral, "to cover another loan." As the narrator laconically appraises Cowperwood's frenzied move, "It was a risky thing to have done, considering that he was in danger of failing."¹ Cowperwood's ploy is risky because he uses stocks—an inherently volatile financial instrument—in an effort to raise cash during a moment of financial panic when stock prices were tumbling precipitously. While on the one hand the scene is a measure of Cowperwood's desperation, on the other hand it's an object lesson in modern finance and the manipulation of risk.

Although finance and commerce have always involved uncertainties and contingent outcomes that those in business seek to guard against, risk itself only became broadly associated with finance in the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the century, risk was still very closely tied to maritime insurance that was sold to offset the dangers of transporting cargo by sea, but over the course of the century, it went from being an individualist commercial notion succinctly captured in Edwin Freedley's claim in A Practical Treatise on Business (1853) that "a man has the right to risk his own capital, but … no right to risk the property of others" to an idea that was applied to a much more expansive set of financial transactions.² Insurance to protect against hazards to life and property, corporate securities issued to raise funds and diffuse financial liability, commodity future [End Page 175] and option contracts purchased to hedge against price volatility, and railroad bonds used to bankroll infrastructure developments turned risk into a much more financially disparate and mediated proposition than the relatively straightforward cargo insurance denoted by the selling of "risk" at the turn of the nineteenth century.³

Many of the financial instruments developed over the nineteenth century represented innovations in risk management. But risk has an upside, or a productive component, as well. This aspect became strikingly visible during the growth phase of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century with the development of the stock market, and especially when finance capitalism emerged from industrial capitalism at the dawn of the twentieth century.⁴ Indeed, by the latter part of the twentieth century, as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai explains, "the machinery for measuring, modeling, managing, predicting, commoditizing, and exploiting risk [had] become the central diacritic of modern capitalism."⁵ The phenomenon Appadurai identifies reached its apotheosis in the decade leading up to the 2008 financial meltdown. Investment bankers in the early twenty-first century developed such abstract forms of finance that risk underwent a 180 degree shift; trading in the derivatives market for securities, in Richard Godden's words, "effectively translate[d] risk from that against which one insures to that in which one invests."⁶ I cite this description of today's derivatives market here because it represents perhaps the outer point of risk as a financial category in its own right. A great deal of innovative humanistic research in what is sometimes referred to as "critical finance studies" that was spurred in part by the 2008 crash has mapped the relations between risk, credit, and debt, especially in fiction and U.S. culture of the last few decades.⁷ In this essay, though, I focus on Theodore Dreiser's 1912 novel, The Financier. Dreiser's book both participates in and subtly analyzes the shift in the conceptualization of risk from something to be guarded against to a source of profit that emerged in the decades surrounding 1900.

This shift in thinking about risk was part of a wide and often heated cultural argument at the time regarding the proper role of risk in the U.S. economy and especially who should be in charge of manipulating that financial risk. In the decade or so prior...

• 风险专业人士中的德莱塞金融家
• Jeffory A. Clymer（生物）

在西奥多·德莱塞 1912 年的小说《金融家》中股市恐慌的戏剧性场景中，主人公弗兰克·考珀伍德努力挽救他摇摇欲坠的经纪业务，而不是通过裁员或出售股票，而是通过积极承担更多风险。Cowperwood 使用借来的资金在费城证券交易所购买价值 60,000 美元的证券，并“立即将其作为抵押品”或将其作为抵押品，“以支付另一笔贷款”。当叙述者简洁地评价考伯伍德的疯狂举动时，“考虑到他有失败的危险，这样做是一件冒险的事情。” ¹Cowperwood 的策略是有风险的，因为他使用股票——一种内在波动的金融工具——来努力在股票价格急剧下跌的金融恐慌时刻筹集现金。一方面，这一场景衡量了考伯伍德的绝望，另一方面，它是现代金融和风险操纵的客观教训。

尽管金融和商业总是涉及商业人士寻求防范的不确定性和或有结果，但风险本身只是在 19 世纪才与金融广泛相关。在本世纪初，风险仍然与海上保险密切相关，该保险被出售以抵消海上运输货物的危险，但在本世纪的过程中，它从埃德温·弗里德利 (Edwin Freedley) 中简明扼要的个人主义商业概念转变为在《商业实用论文》（ A Practical Treatise on Business，1853 年）中声称，“一个人有权拿自己的资本冒险，但是……没有权利拿别人的财产冒险”，这种想法适用于更广泛的金融交易。²保护生命和财产免受危害的保险、为筹集资金和分散金融负债而发行的公司证券、商品期货[完第 175 页]以及为对冲价格波动而购买的期权合约，以及用于为基础设施发展提供资金的铁路债券将风险转化为风险与 19 世纪之交以出售“风险”为代表的相对简单的货物保险相比，它在财务上的差异性和中介性要大得多。³

十九世纪开发的许多金融工具代表了风险管理的创新。但风险也有好处，或有生产力的成分。随着股票市场的发展，在 19 世纪工业资本主义的成长阶段，尤其是在 20 世纪初金融资本主义从工业资本主义中出现时，这一方面变得非常明显。⁴事实上，正如人类学家 Arjun Appadurai 所解释的那样，到 20 世纪后期，“用于衡量、建模、管理、预测、商品化和利用风险的机器[已] 成为现代资本主义的核心变音符号。” ⁵Appadurai 发现的现象在 2008 年金融危机前的十年中达到了巅峰。21 世纪初的投资银行家开发了如此抽象的金融形式，使风险发生了 180 度的转变。用理查德·戈登（Richard Godden）的话说，在证券衍生品市场进行交易，“有效地将[d]风险从一个人投保的风险转化为投资的风险。” ⁶我在这里引用对当今衍生品市场的描述，因为它可能代表了风险的外部点，作为一个金融类别本身。部分由 2008 年金融危机引发的有时被称为“批判性金融研究”的大量创新人文研究描绘了风险、信贷和债务之间的关系，尤其是在小说和最近几年的美国文化中几十年。⁷不过，在这篇文章中，我关注的是西奥多·德莱塞 1912 年的小说《金融家》。德莱塞的书参与并巧妙地分析了风险概念化的转变，从需要防范的事物转变为在 1900 年左右的几十年中出现的利润来源。

这种对风险的思考转变是当时广泛且经常激烈的文化争论的一部分，即风险在美国经济中的适当作用，尤其是谁应该负责操纵金融风险。在十多年前...