Bailout

Monetizing Emma

By Felix Salmon

What’s scarier than Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? That’s easy: Pride and Prejudice and Structured Finance! Which is essentially the theme of Monetizing Emma, a play which I finally got around to seeing at the New York Fringe festival last night. As playwright Felipe Ossa puts it:

Girls have always been involved in economic compromises. We wanted to pose the question: In the 21st century, would a mother be marrying her daughter off to a suitor, or to the marketplace?

The play displays a lot of sophistication about structured finance, as you might expect from a playwright who has also written for the International Financing Review. It’s also very funny and sharply written, which you might not. And, lots of Jane Austen!

I went to see it with someone who knows pretty much nothing about high finance, and she loved it, but the finance-geek in-jokes are great too. Go for the Paris Hilton jokes, stay for the close reading of a bond prospectus. It turns out to be dramatically much more riveting than you could possibly expect, and the sold-out audience of downtown New Yorkers last night loved it.

(Incidentally, the theme of the play is a financial instrument not dissimilar to the jock exchange that Michael Lewis promised us back in 2007. Whatever happened to that?)

Full post as published by Macroprudential on August 20, 2010 (boomark / email).