Questioning Finance
This introductory chapter considers the significance of examining how financial operators and financial products coexist. This coexistence is tense because the bank deals with innovative products that yield unexpected reactions on unevenly charted markets. Since the designs of the financial products introduced here is coextensive to the lives of traders, engineers, and salespeople, these innovations are major protagonists and need to be fleshed out. The chapter also explains how the book is a case study of economic derivation, but rather than look at derivatives as a class of economic goods, it studies derivation as a process. In doing so, it fills the gap between propagandists of financial engineering and its blunt critics by offering some elements of an analysis of economic derivation.