Synopsis

Finance and literature share time. Along with politics, they are the arts of the possible. Life on the trading floor is nothing but a struggle with variables, with events taking unexpected turns. Literature, too, explores eventualities, illuminating glimpses of alternative presents. The pages of this book recount the war waged against the sovereign debts of Europe's periphery and against the continent's single currency, and the drug used to treat the disease. Some of the events narrated did indeed happen. Anger exploded in the streets of Paris, taking on the jaundiced hue of the yellow vests. The fragility of an ancient Italian bank was the epicenter of an earthquake. The interventions of central bankers revealed their political nature. The finance I have tried to restore has ceased to be the art of the possible and has become the most pervasive instrument of defense of the existing. The men who embody its essence are different from the old-school traders, all braces, cigars in their mouths and banknotes in their nostrils. The guardians of existence have made invisibility their norm. They hate excess, are devoted to the supremacy of a world, and do not break the law because they have the strength to write it. I called these warrior-monks the Devils. Their universe has expanded between the web and television series, and so the novel's characters have lived many lives, distancing themselves from the pages that first introduced them. GMB.