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The casino economy had its chance, and it crapped out. (Moberg 2008)

During the current financial crisis it has become com-monplace to equate international finance with casinos (Moore 2007, SocialistWorld.net 2008) and the activities of brokers with gamblers or bookmakers (Kay 2009). In the UK, the Guardian has issued warnings about ‘casino capitalism’ since 2006. Analysts as varied and influential as Will Hutton, Polly Toynbee, Howard Davies and Robert Peston have all used the term.

It is also being used in the United States: at a congres-sional hearing discussing the fate of AIG, for example, California Congresswoman Jackie Speier referred to their Mayfair business as ‘the casino in London’ (Koeing 2008). The Transnational Institute and Institute for Policy studies’ website on the crisis is called simply ‘Casino Crash’ (http://casinocrash.org/), and Brazilian President Lula has described the ‘irresponsibility of speculators who have transformed the world into a gigantic casino’ (Pasricha 2008).

The expression ‘casino capitalism’ is a conflation of a particularly unhelpful kind. It offers no insight into how either international finance or casinos work in practice, as evidenced by anthropological work in both settings. It relies upon a particular model of human nature, exempli-fied by a pre-cultural instinct to trade and barter, recently interrogated by Sahlins (2008), but also powerfully cri-tiqued by many others including Polanyi (1944). The pur-pose of this article is to resist the idea that either banking or casinos can stand in for the most simplistic vision of unfettered market exchange, and to consider why it might be that commentators, including anthropologists, continue to invoke such unhelpful models when it is evident that they are descriptively and analytically inadequate.

I begin by exploring what is meant by ‘casino capi-talism’. I then refer to recent ethnography by anthropolo-gists working in international finance to illustrate the importance of social and historical particularity in this context. I conclude by mentioning three features of casinos

based on fieldwork in London during the past three years – customers, markets and regulation – in order to support the argument that neither individual casinos nor the industry in general are good exemplars of ‘casino capitalism’. My argument is similar to that put forward by Karen Ho in relation to representations of omnipotent capitalism in social science that ‘sound extremely similar to Wall Street triumphalist discourses’ (Ho 2005: 68; see also Rouse 1999). By describing the current crisis as the result of ‘casino capitalism’ commentators are reinforcing familiar and baseless assumptions about exchange and deflecting serious criticism from the true causes of the problem and how we might respond to them.

What is casino capitalism?Casino capitalism was the title of Susan Strange’s book published in 1986. Strange’s thesis was that ‘the roots of the world’s economic disorder are monetary and financial’ and that ‘the disorder has not come about by accident, but has in fact been nurtured and encouraged by a series of [US] government decisions’ (1986: 60). These decisions were animated by the belief that the market should be allowed to operate without interference from the state. Strange identified five ‘distant non-decisions’ that contrib-uted to the rise of casino capitalism, all of which increased dependence upon the US for financial security and OPEC countries for oil (1986: 41-45).

Of more recent policies in the US, casino capitalism was associated with the market fundamentalism of Reagan, Greenspan, Rubin and Gramm. In the UK it was exem-plified by the privatization of utilities and the Big Bang of 1986, overseen by Thatcher. According to Strange’s analysis, non-decisions and policies such as these mas-sively increase the volume, speed and scale of financial transactions and in doing so create unprecedented vola-tility in global markets. These themes have been taken up by numerous widely read authors including George Soros (1998), John Gray (1998) and Naomi Klein (2007; see Hart 2008: 1-3).1

1. Minsky referred to ‘money manager capitalism’ in an influential article on Schumpeter (1990), and Strange herself returned to the theme of instability as the defining feature of the economy in Mad money (1998).

2. For an explanation of arbitrage and a description of its ‘material sociology’, see Beunza, Hardie and MacKenzie 2006.

3. The full text of the declaration is available at: www.etuc.org/a/5367.

4. In the UK the roulette wheel has a single zero; in the US it has two, making it a far less attractive proposition.

5. Not all marketing consultants are equally uncritical: Steve Karoul has written an article in AsiaCasinoMarketing which emphasizes that ‘Asia is not Asia’ and that when devising an ‘Asian’ marketing strategy one must recognize the complex variation within the market, as what may be polite or welcoming to one group of people from within the region may be strange or even offensive to another. www.asiacasinoreport.com/ documents/ AsiaCasinoMarketing-diasporadifferences BySteveKaroul2007.pdf.

6. Sahlins 2008: 96.

Rebecca CassidyRebecca Cassidy is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of Sport of kings (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Horse people (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). She is co-editor, with Molly Mullin, of Where the wild things are now: Domestication reconsidered (Berg, 2007). Her email is r.cassidy@gold.ac.uk.

Fig. 1. Slot machines in the Trump Taj Mahal, Atlantic City, New Jersey.

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‘Casino capitalism’ and the financial crisis

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Allen, A. et al. 2008. Fifth survey of the FSA’s Regulatory Performance. Available at: http://www.fs-pp.org.uk/docs/surveys/bmrb_final_051208.pdf.

Beunza, D. and Stark, D. 2003. Tools of the trade: The socio-technology of arbitrage in a Wall Street trading room. Industrial and Corporate Change 13(2): 369-400.

Buenza, D, Hardie, I. and MacKenzie, D. 2006. A price is a social thing: Towards a material sociology of arbitrage. Organization Studies 27: 721-745.

Fiorito, B. 2006. Calling a lemon a lemon: Regulating electronic gambling machines to contain pathological gambling. Northwestern University Law Review 100(3): 1325-1366.

Friedman, B. 2000. Designing casinos to dominate the competition. Reno, Nevada: Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming.

Gray, J. 1998. False dawn: The delusions of global capitalism. New York: The New Press.

Hart, K. 2008. After the disaster. Anthropology Today 24(2): 1-3.

Ho, K. 2005. Situating global capitalisms: A view from Wall Street investment banks. Cultural Anthropology 20(1): 68-96.

Hughes, J. 2008. FSA to step up its advisory role. Financial Times 30 November.

Hutton, W. 1995. The state we’re in: Why Britain is in crisis and how to overcome it. London: Jonathan Cape.

— 2008. This terrifying moment is our one chance for a new world. The Observer, 5 October; available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/05/banks.marketturmoil

How has the expression ‘casino capitalism’ been used in the UK during the current financial crisis? Rhetorical flourish aside, what did shadow chancellor George Osborne mean when he told the Prime Minister at the Conservative party conference: ‘Gordon, you won’t get away with nailing us for casino capitalism when you’re the man who has been running the casino and collecting the chips for the last 11 years’ (quoted in Wintour 2008)? The economist John Kay is one of the few economists, politicians or journalists to explain his understanding of the relationship between banks, casinos and bookmakers:

The modern financial services industry is a casino attached to a utility. The utility is the payments system, which enables indi-viduals and companies to manage their daily affairs. It allows them to borrow and lend for their routine activities, and allo-cates finance in line with the fundamental value of business activities. In the casino, traders make profits from arbitrage. (2009)2

The contrast is moral as well as functional. Bank lending is presented as structured and patriotic, directed at the growth of business for the good of the nation, by supporting lending, ‘in line with the fundamental value of business activities’. In contrast, the profits of trading ben-efit only the individual. Similarly, Will Hutton contrasts the ‘delinquent casino that is the British financial system’ the priorities of which are ‘individual self-fulfilment, per-sonal experience and loyalty to self’ (2008) with the vision of stakeholder capitalism that he outlined in The state we’re in (1995). The ‘London declaration’, a statement by the European Trade Union Confederation (on ‘the crisis of casino capitalism’), puts this clearly: ‘This crisis was caused by greed and recklessness in Wall Street, London and other major financial centres.’3 Three elements can be identified: greedy individuals, volatile or chaotic markets and the absence or failure of regulation. These monolithic and ahistorical constructions can hardly provide the basis of a critique that will help to resolve the current crisis.

We know from the meticulous work of colleagues including Bill Maurer (2005), Caitlin Zaloom (2006), Karen Ho (2005) and Donald Mackenzie (2003) that trading rooms and banks provide rich evidence that inter-national finance is an internally diverse and complex assemblage. MacKenzie and Millo’s work with traders on the Chicago Board Options Exchange established the fundamental premise that financial and other kinds of exchanges cannot be separated:

Day after day, year after year, members of open-outcry exchanges trade with each other face-to-face. They have the incentive to monitor each other’s conduct and (because so much of this conduct occurs in a public arena) have the capacity to do so closely. Infractions are remembered, sometimes for dec-ades. The result is a moral economy as well as a financial one. (2003: 117)

The co-creation of financial and moral economies is not limited to markets animated by face-to-face encoun-ters. Technologies that facilitate communication and which may suggest cultural neutrality in various degrees including numbers, screens and buildings are vigorously appropriated by individuals, who inscribe upon them their own predilections and concerns (Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2002, Beunza and Stark 2004).

The combination of face-to-face encounters and tech-nology designed to reproduce and record disembodied principles of economic rationalism on the trading floor in Chicago produces a particularly arresting image in Zaloom’s work (2003). Engineers produce hardware and software in accordance with an idealized vision of market exchange, only for it to be personalized by individual traders alert to social and sensual determinants and indica-tors of good business (the movements of crowds, facial expressions, etc.).

Unlike the homogenous entities suggested by ‘casino capitalism’, national and regional contrasts, styles and preoccupations reveal themselves in the global market for finance (Miyazaki 2003, Maurer 2005). Outside anthro-pology, geographers Leyshon and Thrift (1997) have described the importance of ‘face work’ in London in the 1980s. Pryke and Lee (1995) have used the study of mortgage-backed securities within the City of London to explore the clustering of financial production contra the idea that financial institutions somehow exist outside his-tory and place and the personal connections that financial exchanges generate and depend upon.

All this work reinforces what anthropologists already know about exchange more generally: that important differ-ences exist between particular incarnations of international finance, in terms of locality and function. Ethnographic evidence has debunked the idea that people working in the financial sector behave according to principles they have learned from economics textbooks. Insiders like Gillian Tett (former anthropologist and assistant editor of the Financial Times) have blown open the eccentric world of investment banking in London (2008). Many economists are acutely aware of the shortcomings of the models they have inherited (see, for example, the Post-Autistic Economics Network at: http://www.paecon.net/autistic economist; also Ferber and Nelson 1993). What about casinos?

CasinosThe increased use of the term ‘casino capitalism’ in the British press and the anthropological canon coincided with my fieldwork in betting shops and casinos in London. I was encouraged to reflect on my experiences in these terms, and to investigate productive contrasts between the idea of gambling and its practice. It was casino industry professionals who alerted me to the idea that gambling is a thoroughly embedded activity, that particular games have specific potential and meaning and that discerning customers will relocate rather than game on terms that are not of their choosing:

Gambling in a casino isn’t like shopping in a supermarket. Games and places take on particular meanings that are vulner-able to bad influences. On an individual level, a good croupier will know his big customers and anticipate bad scenes and if possible, prevent them. On a bigger scale, you don’t feng shui up the place and then give them blackjack (David, Casino pro-fessional 2007).

A recent review of the differences between ‘Asian’ and ‘Western’ casino customers support this idea at a regional level, concluding that:

The casino industry is one where stark contrasts in customer behavior are evident between the West and the East, and where globalization is probably least apparent. (Kale and Spence 2008: 2)In North America and Europe slot machines are far more

significant than table games. The reverse is true in Macau. In the first quarter of 2008, for example, slots accounted for almost 70% of total gaming revenue in Nevada and only 4.5% in Macau. Asian casinos are clearly ‘table-centric’ (Kale and Spence 2008: 2). Furthermore, not all table games are equally popular in different jurisdictions and among different groups of players. As any London croupier will tell you, American customers are likely to play blackjack, Chinese to play roulette or baccarat.4 In Nevada in April 2008, for example, blackjack accounted for 43% of table game revenue, baccarat and mini-baccarat for 23%. In Macau during the first quarter of 2008, black-jack provided MOP0.6 billion (2% of the total) in revenue while baccarat provided MOP26.2 billion (87% of the total) (Kale and Spence 2008: 2).

Kale and Spence are trying to formulate a marketing strategy for casino operators, based on simplistic and

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Kale, S. and Spence, M.T. 2008. Casino operators in Asian vs western gaming jurisdictions: Implications for western casino operators. Available at: SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1152098

Kay, J. 2009. Making banks boring again. Prospect Magazine January: 154.

Klein, N. 2007. The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. London: Allen Lane.

Knight, F. 1921. Risk, uncertainty and profit. Boston, MA: Hart, Schaffner and Marx/ Houghton Mifflin Co.

Knorr Cetina, K.and Bruegger, U. 2002. Global microstructures: The virtual societies of financial markets. American Journal of Sociology 107(4): 905-950.

Koeing, P. 2008. AIG trail leads to London ‘casino’. Daily Telegraph, 18 October.

Leyshon, A. and Thrift, N. 1997. A phantom state? The de-traditionalization of money, the international financial system and international financial centers. In Money/space: Geographies of monetary transformation, Leyshon, A and N. Thrift (eds), pp. 291-322. London & New York: Routledge.

MacKenzie, D. 2003. Long term capital management and the sociology of arbitrage. Economy and Society 32(3): 349-380.

— and Millo, Y. 2003. Constructing a market, performing theory: The historical sociology of a financial derivatives exchange. American Journal of Sociology 109: 107-145.

Maurer, B. 2005. Due diligence and ‘reasonable man,’ offshore. Cultural Anthropology 20(4): 474-505.

Minsky, H. 1990. Schumpeter: Finance and evolution. In: Heertje, A. and Perlman, M. (eds) Evolving technology and market structure studies in Schumpeterian economics, pp 51-74. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Miyazaki, H. 2003. The temporalities of the market. American Anthropologist 105(2): 255-265.

Moberg, D. 2008. Beyond casino capitalism. In these times, 8 December; available at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4066/beyond_casino_capitalism/

perhaps offensive observations such as: ‘Asian socie-ties tend to be a lot more collectivist in their orientation than Western societies’ (ibid.: 7).5 Despite the obvious limitations of their understanding of cultural difference, their data is useful. It illustrates the fact that the games offered by casinos reflect complex social histories and associations.

My fieldwork in casinos and among regular gamblers in London supports this idea. Dice playing, for example, continues to be associated with gangster glamour, having been imported via the morally ambiguous terrain of the docks of Liverpool and London after the Second World War. The changing demographic composition of wealthy Londoners since the civil war in Lebanon and the fall of the Soviet Union, among other world historical events, can be traced through the provision of different table games. Casino customers make choices between games on the basis of a combination of factors which may include the potential return, but are more likely to be a reflection of their playing history and education. Superstition is rife, and certain casinos keep tables or even rooms solely for the benefit of the wealthy individual who will play there, and nowhere else. The significance of this point for opera-tors is captured in books like Designing casinos to domi-nate the competition (Friedman 2000).

Money is always moving in the casino, as this is the way in which it multiplies. Transactions invigorate existing relationships and create new ones. Cash circulates through several different but related systems, via tips to waitresses, informal loans and gifts. Economists might seek to explain the numerous informal loans that circulate in the casino as ways of spreading risk, but in many cases direct return is not expected.

I have often received unsolicited gifts of money from strangers in casinos, having played out my paltry budget. In each case this money was given casually and without apparent expectation (or realization) of return. In betting shops and in casinos, ‘luck money’ is given to strangers in the belief that money should be circulated rather than hoarded. Players are responsible for keeping the money moving, they recognize that the essential nature of the

game is such that anyone could be lucky. As one regular casino customer told me, ‘I bung him some cash because I feel like it. Easy come, easy go. I don’t want it back. If I did, I wouldn’t give it away.’

Should anthropologists regard these activities as residual, my fieldwork as salvage anthropology of an older system? Will these differences be eradicated by accelera-tion and new technology and thus create an activity that is helpfully examined as one more example of ‘casino capitalism’ in action? Is the latest generation of electronic slot machines less susceptible to interpretation than the more traditional table games? Or, like traders in Chicago, do gamblers appropriate new technology in unanticipated ways? Game design research has identified multiple moti-vations for play in this sector, and these are rarely simply profit maximization, but include sensual and cognitive pleasures such as TOD (time on device), soundscape and degree of randomness.

Game designers have also learned to appeal to familiar and comfortable themes to entice players to use their consoles. At the annual UK Betting Show in 2007, for example, the largest display consisted of a machine that asked Deal or no deal?, referring to a popular Channel 4 TV game show. In the US in 2004, International Game Technology’s most popular machine, Wheel of Fortune, known simply as ‘Wheel’ was reported to be making more than one billion dollars a year (Rivlin 2004). According to one game designer, it is almost impossible to predict which machine will prove a hit, but ‘it’s not a problem, because the games are cheap. You can buy a new one and it pays for itself in a few weeks.’ Operators provide a constant stream of new machines for customers to try out, and preserve older, popular themes in new editions, some of which are explicitly nostalgic, appealing to the strong market for slots among older men and women.

Slots design revolves around maximizing REVPAC (revenue per available customer), but industry profes-sionals agree that the way to do this is not simply through price, but also through features that are highly specific to different groups of people. For example, game designers explain how they optimize REVPAC by avoiding certain

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colour combinations that are inauspicious in favour of numbers and colours that are considered lucky.

More sophisticated versions of the ‘puffed reels’ of mechanical slots are reproduced in the ‘near miss’ effect. Time between spins is minimized in order to induce trance-like states and maximize turnover. Either random-ness or skill is emphasized or ignored, in keeping with the perceived preferences of certain demographics, based on data gathered from loyalty cards and customer profiling (Fiorito 2006). As industry marketers warn, in this highly differentiated market, what works in one jurisdiction is not simply transferable to another. The preferences of casino customers must be discovered, rather than assumed.

Risk and uncertaintyIn False dawn, John Gray refers to the exposure of govern-ments to ‘environments not merely of risk but of radical uncertainty’ (1998: 74). One of the causes of this uncer-tainty is that international finance is vulnerable to rumour and to the actions and inaction of charismatic individuals and firms. The case of Bernard Madoff illustrates this par-ticularly well, as does Jim Rogers’ advice, broadcast on Bloomberg, to dump sterling following the dramatic fall in the share price of Royal Bank of Scotland on 19 January 2009. This process can be observed at the micro level as well, as MacKenzie has argued: ‘[a]rbitrageur’s beliefs have a self-fulfilling aspect’ (2006: 5).

The price of taking part in various transactions is thus variable. Radical uncertainty is also produced by the com-plexity of transactions, particularly derivatives, the value of which may be virtually impossible to calculate. As Chris Skinner of the Financial Services Club says:

Assets are related to global markets and future contracts, deriv-atives contracts that are hard to put into a context that says in isolation, ‘this is what they mean’, because often they are inter-related with lots of other instruments and other geographies, and so that’s the concern. Investors are saying, ‘if the bank cannot show me exactly what the cost of these assets is going to be I cannot trust the bank’s accounting.’ (Today, BBC Radio 4, 20 January 2009)

Casinos do not produce radical uncertainty, they deal solely in risk (Knight 1921). Returns in legal, regulated casinos must be predictable and consistent. In many juris-dictions, a player must be informed of the exact rate of return over time offered by each game. These percentages may be set according to the game, the denomination of the machine, or the location. In Nevada, for example, per-centages for 1¢ slot machines in 2008 were: The Strip – 88.35%, Downtown – 88.96%, Boulder Strip – 89.66%, North Las Vegas – 90.23%. Pricing is thus transparent and fixed. It is possible to calculate liabilities and assets simply by looking at the game, the stakes and the chips remaining.

In the UK, the provision of large and medium-sized casinos is limited by government. Within these limits, par-ticular casinos are subject to a comprehensive licensing process overseen by the Gambling Commission (GC). The games offered must be chosen from an approved list and played in accordance with the Commission’s Rules of casino games in Great Britain (2008). Casinos are inspected and the GC may withdraw a licence from any casino held to be in breach of the rules. British casino professionals believe that the effect of policies that might have been described as deregulatory in spirit, including the creation of the GC, have increased regulation in practice.

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) regulates finan-cial services in the UK, and was found to be guilty of a ‘systematic failure of duty’ over the collapse of Northern Rock by the House of Commons Treasury Committee (2008). In November 2008, the chief executive of the FSA, Hector Sants, described a move towards a ‘more intrusive’

style of supervision, but the implementation of this new policy was dependent upon his staff developing a far better understanding of the institutions they oversee (Hughes 2008). Although the FSA has the power to impose unlim-ited fines on transgressors, it is seen as lagging behind the industry in its understanding of when and how it might enforce this power to maximum effect (Allen et al. 2008).

Casinos and international finance do have something in common – their customers and professionals do not behave according to naive economic principles. These similari-ties are unrecognized because they destabilize the idea of the individual at the heart of the analogy between casinos and international finance. They reflect the social and reciprocal elements of exchange, in contrast to exchange seen as atomized individual accumulation. Casinos and international finance also differ in suggestive ways. The uncertainty of international finance is not reproduced in the casino, where returns are a direct reflection of the game and the stake, and probabilities are fixed and calculable.

Furthermore, in mature gambling jurisdictions, casino regulation determines not just which games may be played, but also the rules of those games, reinforced by a licensing regime which places compliance at the centre of operations. The gambler may bring a particular level of knowledge or self-control to the tables, but the structural qualities of the game will not differ.

Regulation of international finance appears to be deter-mined by both market fundamentalism and the fact that the regulators don’t know what games might be being played, let alone how they might control them across jurisdictions. This contrast between casinos and international finance draws attention to the question of how the intentional and unintentional combine, perhaps through a review of the history of relationships between relevant bodies, the industry and the state. The contrasts between the two again suggest that ‘casino capitalism’ is an inappropriate way to describe international finance, and also point towards questions that might help us toward a better understanding of the current crisis.

What political work does the analogy between the most recent wave of market fundamentalist capitalism and casinos perform? It leaves the basic idea of human nature as inherently grasping and blind to the fate of others untouched. Greed, or profit maximization, takes centre stage, as both the problem and the solution of how people might live together. Despite the vast quantities of anthropological evidence to the contrary, co-operation, mutuality and empathy are reduced to effects of regula-tion: alien impulses imposed upon individuals by govern-ments seeking to set limits on those of us who insist on ‘doing what comes naturally’ – shafting other people in order to prosper.

According to this logic, serious alternatives to the cur-rent system, including ‘democratic solidarity’ achieved by ‘combining the free reciprocity of self-organized groups with the redistributive powers of the state’ (Hart 2008: 2) are non-starters, based on a misguided conception of human nature.

Casino capitalism was a potentially subversive way of describing the most recent wave of market fundamen-talism in the UK and the US, but it failed to realize its promise. Continuing to describe the current crisis in this way further abstracts international finance, making it less knowable and thus less accessible to criticism. The expression ‘casino capitalism’ makes disparate events and processes superficially familiar and similar in a way that obscures our efforts to understand them. It does not pro-vide a coherent criticism of the systems that produced the current crisis, an explanation of how it might have devel-oped or, most importantly, any guidance as to how we might act in the future. l

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— 1998. Mad money: When markets outgrow governments. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Wintour, P. 2008. Osborne tells city to clean up the ‘capitalist casino’. Guardian, 30 September.

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— 2006. Out of the pits: Traders and technology from Chicago to London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.