Thomas Steinfeld on capitalism

Even economic journalism is not immune to cheap metaphors, culture journalist Thomas Steinfeld notes with satisfaction. He analyses the metaphor of the locust, which is used to depict the merciless, cynical and insatiable nature of capitalism. "When the modern speculator first appeared on the literary stage in the 1980s he produced heroes, buccaneers, pirates of the globalised financial world. Tom Wolfe paid tribute to these 'masters of the universe' in his novel 'The Bonfire of the Vanities' (1987). ... The most recent speculative madness, however, no longer produces heroes - their activities have become too small-scale, too pitiless, too interchangeable, so that the old comparison with the insect world no longer seems purely coincidental. The protagonists of the rampant world of finance have become, to put it in Marxist terms, the agents of capital - and nothing more."

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