Yablonski nodded, grimly amused. “If the world ends, the dollar is in trouble. But aside from that contingency, we’re here to defend it in the ways we’ve been given. That’s what we’re tasked with. Monetary policy, not fiscal policy. And the carbon tax proposals are gaining momentum, we feel.”
Mary said, “But you need a carrot to go with the stick. The modeling shows that, not to mention common sense.”
“Not our purview,” Yablonski said. The Europeans nodded in agreement; the Chinese official, an elderly man, looked on more sympathetically.
“But maybe it should be,” Mary said.
Now Yablonski looked displeased. This was her meeting, after all. Mary was there as a guest, making a pitch. And even though the global situation was urgent, and the new tool promising, Yablonski wasn’t going to expose herself and her institution to that kind of heat without being ordered to do it by Congress. This was expressed very clearly just by the look on her face.
It was the same with the Europeans. China might be different, but Mary didn’t think China would lead on this issue. It needed everyone on board for it to work; all the central banks would have to agree to both the problem and the solution. If they decided not to back this plan, no one could coerce them to change their minds; they were de-linked from their legislatures precisely to be able to avoid political pressure of any kind.
Mary regarded them, thinking it through. Because money ruled the world, these people ruled the world. They were the world’s rulers, in some very real sense. Bankers. Non-democratic, answerable to no one. The technocratic elite at its most elite: financiers. Mary thought of her group back in Zurich. It was composed of experts in the various fields involved in the matter, people with all kinds of expertise, many of them scientists, all with extensive field experience of one sort or another. Here, she was looking at a banker, a banker, a banker, a banker, and a banker. Even if they understood an idea, even if they liked an idea, they wouldn’t necessarily act on it. One principle for bankers in perilous times was to avoid doing anything too radical and untried. And so they were all going to go down.
Looking out over San Francisco and its bay, at Mount Tamalpais and the broad stretch of the Pacific, Mary heaved a sigh. This was not just a meeting of two women and three men, but of five teams, five institutions, five nation-states at the heart of the global nation-state system. The Paris Agreement’s Ministry for the Future was small and impoverished, these central banks were big and rich. Just because the need was urgent and her case was good, that didn’t mean anything would change. You couldn’t change things with just an idea, no matter how good it was. Was that right? It felt right. Power was entrenched— but that phrase caught just a hint of the situation— actually the trenches were foundations that went right to the center of the earth. They could not be changed.
The meeting dragged to a close. Time to get a drink. Nothing had happened.
46
I was born small, as so many things are. A marsupial perhaps. People came to me and reached inside me to pass things to each other. I helped them do that. When I was young I had no blood, and people moving things around inside me had to do it by feel. They had to decide by feel alone which things were equally useful to them. And so few things are equally useful. Indeed only two identical things are equally useful; two hearts, two livers, two drops of blood. So in people’s attempts to pass things around, there was friction. It was time-consuming and unsatisfactory. People would sometimes say “all things being equal,” but this was never the case, so I was judged to have a difficult and unsatisfactory body, until my blood finally came into me, and stomach acids. All the fluids of metamorphosis, of life. Then things dropped into me could be digested and moved elsewhere in my body to do something else.
My stomach made disparate things the same by way of digestion into blood. This made food of all the things brought into me, and I quickly grew. I am an omnivore. And as I grew I ate more and more.
Every thing fed to me made other things. I digested things and turned them to blood, which moved around in me and helped to reconstitute some other thing of use; bone, or muscle, or some vital organ. Helping in this process were my mouth, esophagus, intestine, arteries, and veins, all of which grew with me, making a whole body out of which new things also useful could grow, things people wanted. I grew and grew and grew.
In this process, as in any body, there were useless residues not taken up in the new process, which left me in the usual ways. Thus sweat, urine, shit, tears.
My body worked so well that eventually all things everywhere were swallowed and digested by me. I grew so large that I ate the world, and all the blood in the world is mine. What am I? You know, even though you are like everything else, and see me from the inside. I am the market.
47
He spent his days around Zurich. On
