Interview
"The Capitalism crises are always there because, mathematically, the confluence of so much greed is unsustainable"
Argentinian Hernán Díaz wrote a critically acclaimed book on Wall Street and won the Pulitzer. Obama, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal recommend it. LPO interviewed him exclusively.

Hernán Díaz has lived in New York for many years and writes in English. But he was born in Buenos Aires, the city where he has just had the presentation of "Fortuna" (Trust) at the International Book Fair. Díaz's second novel delves into a world as powerful as unknown, and it tells the story of a financier who rises to the top during the height of the pre-Great Depression of the 1930s. "Trust" quickly became a best seller and it is considered by the most influential voices in the United States. Barack Obama distinguished it among the 10 most important books of the year, the same did The Washington Post. In 2022, The New York Times considered it a notable book, and magazines like Time and New Yorker included it among their preferences. Edited in Spanish by Anagrama, the original "Trust" is on its way to becoming an HBO series by actress and producer Kate Winslet. In an exclusive dialogue with LPO, the Argentine writer spoke about the logic of the financial system, the absence of novels on the subject in North America literature and how Wall Street influences American society.

How do you evaluate the success of the book in the United States?

I don't know how I evaluate it, but I experience it with surprise and gratitude. I write since I was a child, and it was very difficult for me to publish. I started publishing very late because the North American literary market has its special features and it was very difficult for me to enter it. After many years of absolute rejection, experiencing this is extraordinary, and I am very grateful.

High finance people wrote to me with great enthusiasm. The book is very critical of that world, but I think there is also respect for its complexity. I do not come from that world, and to start writing in a credible way about the world of finance was like... Could I?

What was the impact of the book on the world of finance?

High finance people wrote to me with great enthusiasm. The book is very critical of that world because of all the research and archival work I've done, but I think there is also respect for its complexity. This two things can go together, criticism and recognition of a certain sophistication it can have and what place in history it also has. There have been several reactions, all of them positive, surprisingly for me.

We can think that the world of Obama and the New York Times and that of Wall Street are antagonistic.

Not necessarily. It even got good reviews in the The Wall Street Journal and The Economist, two very conservative publications. It was my biggest fear. I do not come from that world, and to start writing in a credible way about the world of finance was like... Could I? So that was a validation.

"The Capitalism crises are always there because, mathematically, the confluence of so much greed is unsustainable"

When and why did you start thinking about writing this book?

I started writing about that world first out of an abstract interest, I cannot say why. I thought it was interesting to write about an astronomical wealth, not just someone with money, but a kind of black hole. Something of absolute density and gravitational power. That notion appealed to me for reasons I cannot explain. But when I began to think in a more systematic and orderly way, I also realized that there were no novels in the American canon about the accumulation of money, about the labyrinths of capital, about the gears of finance in a detailed way.

I happens a lot with power characters - with the areas where power circulates - that are not narrated and they narrate themselves.

Very well said, yes, they narrate themselves. And that was also an incentive: to say, well, since there is a gap here, since there is an absence, there is also room for invention.

I thought it was interesting to write about an astronomical wealth, something of absolute density and gravitational power. But then I realized that there were no novels in the American canon about the accumulation of money, the labyrinths of capital and gears of finance.

The book shows that the crisis in the United States is recurring, one of the protagonists says that the Bevels survived eight crises since 1807.

Crises are always there because, mathematically, the confluence of so much greed is unsustainable, of conflicting avarice and selfishness. It is not possible and that is why crisis is structural. Because capitalism is also based on the rationalization of greed, on the systematization of it. But the mathematical limits exist and there is also an affective or emotional dimension of finance, something very thought in the last decades of the economy, not before.

Adam Smith's idea of markets rationally conducted is obviously false. You can see it everywhere, in Argentina, in almost all bank runs, they are not necessarily rational, they are self-fulfilling prophecies. Someone who thinks, who feels his or her money is at risk and by withdrawing all his or her money, he or she effectively puts it at risk.

It is said that capital is a living being with an aseptic existence and the crisis is introduced as a natural disaster. What is that conviction based on?

It has to do with what is called fetishism in Marxist theory. It is an elaborated notion that has different definitions. One of them is the creation of what is known as a second nature and this idea of the alienation of work: to erase the marks of human labor from commodities or markets and making something that is manufactured - handmade in the etymological sense, a result of human labor - appear simply as a given.

Capitalism is based on the rationalization of greed, on the systematization of it. But the confluence of greed and selfishness is not possible and that is why the crisis is structural.

When you enter your house and turn on the light, it is the most natural thing - I use the word deliberately - for the light to materialize. There is no possible reflection. When power goes out, that's a reminder that nothing is natural. It is the result of an industry, of thousands of people working, of a business model. The work behind that is revealed. And this idea of the natural can also be applied to the business world, the idea that markets are governed by laws of physics, such as gravity and electromagnetism, which are natural forces. They cannot be questioned, they cannot be touched, they cannot be intervened because... how are you going to intervene nature?

Markets are often ghostly entities that most people know nothing about. In the novel, the financier is a true Renaissance man and says that his success is based on a true understanding of human behavior. How does this definition come about?

It must be remembered that the protagonist is a very self-indulgent person, who is creating that image of himself as a hero and a great man. But what is behind that is something more or less true. Almost all the activities and social relationships we establish are in some way mediated by money. It is an absolutely sordid, sad and oppressive thought, it terrifies me to think that it is so. I think it is so to a large extent! I do not like it, but it is something I see. At the same time, I also see that there are activities that are exempt: legitimate friendship, honestly felt affection, the relationship with art, they are immune. That is why art is important, in an exchange society, where everything is for something else, potentially a commodity.

"The Capitalism crises are always there because, mathematically, the confluence of so much greed is unsustainable"

There is an idea presented by the protagonist of the book: personal benefit goes hand in hand with public good, and business can go hand in hand with patriotism.

The idea that the individual good coincides with the public good is present in many texts of that time I read, especially in the 1920s, when everyone thought there was no limit to the growth of the stock market. But it is an idea that appears very strongly later, especially in the eighties.

Milton Friedman, a Chicago school economist who won a Nobel Prize for some reason. His idea is that what is good for shareholders is good for the population at large. That obvious fallacy. An example, the opioid crisis in the United States generated a great number of addictions and deaths. With scientific pharmacology reports indicating this early on, the Sackler family's Purdue Pharma forged ahead. They made billions. Was it good for shareholders? Yes. Was it good for society? No. Another example is Facebook, that shares disinformation online and generates a certain addiction to certain algorithms regardless of the content, even if they are false. The important thing is to get clicks to be able to sell advertising, which they did. It was good for shareholders. Was it good for society? No. Greed as altruism has neither head nor tail but it is an argument that continues to be made all the time.

Prior to the crisis of the 1930s, the practice of the financier spread to a social level and common people began to speculate with money they did not have, everyone felt entitled to become reach. Do you think that is still so?

More or less. Some things can be seen. The Bitcoin phenomenon is a bit like that. So much has changed in this almost 100 years. Stock transactions are so computerized and follow such precise rates, unless you have a very specific fact or interest that a company is going to merge, it is impossible for you to beat the Standard and Poor index. If you invest according to that index, there is no financial horoscope that can beat that. Maybe marginally or with certain technologies swapping very quickly, but I think the space has been minimized for these epic or creative characters doing gigantic maneuvers with actions.

Milton Friedman says that what is good for shareholders is good for the population at large. An obvious fallacy. Facebook, putting misinformation online and generating a kind of addiction, got clicks in order to sell advertising, which they did. It was good for shareholders. Was it good for society? No.

The idea that the system lays down in a bubble annoys Benjamin Rask, the protagonist. But when the crisis comes, no one feels responsible for the burst of that bubble.

Sure. We are the ones who triumph but we are defeated by forces that exceed us. It's like that for me too: if I win, I win. On the other hand, people never crash, they always say ‘the other hit me'. We can all be delirious with expenses and euphoric when there is a moment of bonanza for whatever. But this euphoria is usually part of the reason why everything collapses afterwards. There is a perverse symmetry between euphoria and collapse. We never think that there is a connection and that we are part of. There are examples everywhere, in the United States and in Argentina too.

"The Capitalism crises are always there because, mathematically, the confluence of so much greed is unsustainable"

The anarchist printer, father of one of the key characters, thinks that Wall Street is based on a fiction. Do people who are part of that world support that idea or are they convinced that it is a solid construction?

They are convinced not only that it is solid, but that it is the foundation of society. Paradoxically, these abstractions are the necessary condition that supports our concrete world. They have the blind conviction of that, they do not doubt.

What is it like for an Argentine or a Latino to notice that - as it is stated in the book - American society fear getting into debt? It is current today, because most of them go into debt to study, to buy a car...

It is 100 percent like that in the United States. But I am terrified of debt, I cannot sleep at night, it has happened to me. I am out now, I will fall again. I do not think of myself in terms of nationalities or ethnicities, but what I can say is that you always have to remember that debt is a commodity. Not for you, but for your creditor. Debts are sold, bought, quoted, they go up, go down and I think in part there is a great interest in promoting this system through which we are all in debt, precisely because we are creating value, a commodity for other people. All this happens without you realizing that your debt changes hands all the time, but it does, and bundles of debt are made and sold.

Did it happen to you?

I have a mortgage and I recently refinanced it with a bank, bank X. It was quite a process, but after months I refinanced it. After 48 hours, I received an email: "Dear customer: your mortgage is with bank Z." Of course, bank Z bought a thousand mortgages, among which was mine, and now it belongs to bank Z. Nothing changes for me, but there is an exchange in which someone made money selling this mortgage.

Debts are sold, bought, quoted, they go up, go down and there is great interest in promoting this system through which we are all in debt because we are creating value, a commodity for other people.

Debt is a commodity but it has the peculiarity that it includes a bond between debtor and creditor. It is not a fleeting transaction but ties us to the creditor.

You have just explained the 2008 crisis. That was what happened. In fact, there were mortgages, someone realized that many people were not going to be able to pay. The bond was broken and that created a domino effect.

"The Capitalism crises are always there because, mathematically, the confluence of so much greed is unsustainable"

In "Trust", New York City is mention as the capital of the future, but it is noted that its inhabitants are pure nostalgia. Why is that?

That is something I see all the time in New York, a conversation you hear no matter the social class. They can be artists and bohemians, or people in high finance. It is a very New York thing to hear that this is not the real New York anymore, that the real New York was the punk scene in the 70's or the indie scene in the 90's, and that this is like a tourist version of that. Or the grandeur of 1880, or the eighties of the 20th century for financiers. It is funny, and I find myself, 25 years later, doing the same. I do not know why. Perhaps because it is so changeable and there is an obsession with the original experience of the city.

You said in an interview that anarchists are the great excluded from the history of the United States. Why? What does it mean?

Because they were always perceived as a threat, and I think they were a more real threat at that time, with a strong presence, with successful attempts to organize union movements, labor forces, in a more active, aggressive way, to organize workers' struggles, to say it in old-fashioned terms. And obviously, that in the United States is No. That is something that started in the 1890s and continued for 30 years. There were a lot of lynchings, executions and strikes that were repressed with homicidal violence, with deaths. This is something I didn't know about, but it is also something nobody talks about. They suppressed strikes. I'm not telling you that they were anarchists who were planting bombs, they also did, but I'm not talking about that.

That was the time when there could have been a leftist movement in the United States - which obviously isn't and never was - and it was crushed. The stereotype of the Italian as a mafioso has to do with that, with the criminalization of everything related to the Italian because below that are the syndicalists, the communists, the socialists, the anarchists, the social organizers. That is criminal. The mafia was the smallest, the other was the largest and most important. What prevailed was not the socialist Italian: it was the mafioso Italian. To paint that whole community in a criminal way.

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El argentino Hernán Díaz escribió un libro sobre Wall Street aclamado por la crítica y ganó el Premio Pulitzer. Obama, New York Times y Wall Street Journal lo recomiendan. LPO lo entrevistó en exclusiva.