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“... Click​ on a link to an article on a news website. If you have a fast internet connection, you’ll see the article almost immediately, but the slots for adverts will usually remain empty for another second or two. The ads which then appear aren’t generally chosen in advance. Instead, a near instantaneous, automated auction of each slot goes on behind the scenes to determine which ad you will be shown ...”

“... For​ years, I impatiently clicked ‘Accept Cookies’ without, I confess, really knowing what a cookie was. It turns out that it’s a short sequence of letters and numbers that a website generates and deposits in your browser. From then on, whenever you make a new request of the site, or visit the site again at some later date, the browser sends the cookie back to the site ...”

“... You could walk around Mayfair all day and not notice them. Hedge funds don’t – can’t – advertise. The most you’ll see is a discreet nameplate or two. An address in Mayfair counts in the world of hedge funds. It shows you’re serious, and have the money and confidence to pay the world’s most expensive commercial rents. A nondescript office no larger than a small flat can cost £150,000 a year ...”

“... to pursue: installs of Angry Birds; sales of saris made by village women; voters signing up for a Donald Trump rally. People whose political predilections resemble mine often like to think that the explanation for Trump’s 2016 election win or the result of the Brexit referendum is cunning microtargeting by political consultants using platforms such as ...”

“... Every time​ a bitcoin ‘miner’ is successful they create for themselves 12.5 new bitcoins, currently worth around $60,000. If they don’t succeed, they can have another go roughly ten minutes later – all day, every day. It isn’t surprising, therefore, that despite the sharp fall in bitcoin’s dollar price in 2018 there is still a lot of mining going on ...”

“... Few people’s reputations have been improved by the credit crisis. One is the BBC’s Robert Peston; another is Vince Cable. A third is Gillian Tett, capital markets editor of the Financial Times. Prior to the crisis, she and her team were the only mainstream journalists who covered in any detail the arcane world of ‘credit derivatives’. Tett saw – however imperfectly – the huge risks that were accumulating unnoticed within that world, and spoke out about them ...”

“... Last November, I spent several days in the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, in banks’ headquarters in the City and in the pale wood and glass of a hedge fund’s St James’s office trying to understand the credit crisis that had erupted over the previous four months. I became intrigued by an oddity that I came to think of as the end-of-the-world trade ...”

“... The Four Seasons hotel, Houston, 20 January 2000. The investment managers and analysts packed into the ballroom are paying only partial attention to the presentation by the Enron Corporation. On the New York Stock Exchange, Enron’s shares have been rising all day, by as much as $2 an hour. It is now mid-afternoon, New York is about to close, and the members of the audience know that the moment to profit will have passed if they wait for the dramatic announcement they all suspect is coming ...”

“... What goes on in stock markets appears quite different when viewed on different timescales. Look at a whole day’s trading, and market participants can usually tell you a plausible story about how the arrival of news has changed traders’ perceptions of the prospects for a company or the entire economy and pushed share prices up or down. Look at trading activity on a scale of milliseconds, however, and things seem quite different ...”

“... Dark pools’​ are private, electronic share-trading venues in which a participant can bid to buy shares or offer to sell them without those bids or offers being visible to the market at large. For most of their history – they’ve been around for nearly thirty years – they have attracted little attention, but that has changed fast in the last couple of years ...”

“... Three years ago, the Bank of England set out to calculate a figure that does more than any other to shatter banking’s preferred image of itself. The figure made its first, understated appearance in March 2010, when Andrew Haldane, the Bank’s Executive Director for Financial Stability, included it in a talk in Hong Kong, then reappeared later that year in a chart buried at the back of the December issue of the Bank’s Financial Stability Report ...”

“... Universities contain rooms and buildings that academics never enter, such as boiler houses. At my university, Edinburgh, some of the meters in these boiler houses now have two roles: as well as determining our gas bills, they measure, indirectly, our emissions of carbon dioxide. The meters have become part of the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme, and thus are part of a microcosm of what may become a worldwide carbon market ...”

“... The beams​ are infrared, which means you can’t see them, but lasers are now flashing stock-market data through the skies over New Jersey. If they work well there, they might soon be flashing over London too. Lasers are the latest tool for high-frequency trading: the fast, entirely automated trading of large numbers of shares and other financial instruments ...”

“... In​ 2008, Donald MacKenzie expounded to LRB readers with admirable clarity the workings of Libor (the London Interbank Offered Rate), which establishes the benchmark terms on which hundreds of trillions of dollars are lent and borrowed across the world every day.* It sometimes comes as a surprise to the uninitiated to learn that Libor has never been based on transactions which have actually taken place but on the interest rates at which the participating banks say they could borrow money if they chose ...”

“... conscience by promoting good causes at other people’s expense? In Statistics in Britain D.A. MacKenzie has harnessed this theory to explain the work of Francis Galton (1822-1911), Karl Pearson (1857-1936) and R.A. Fisher (1890-1962): ‘I argue that eugenics did not merely motivate their statistical work but affected its content.’ That one’s family ...”