Now we are in a strange period when those swindles are unwinding. The people who run the finance sector — the Wall Street investment banks, hedge funds and ratings agencies, the Federal Reserve, and the US Dept of the Treasury — in desperately trying to prevent the unwind, have rapidly ramped up another new economy based entirely on the buying and selling of risk. Risk, as a pure abstraction unconnected to any real capital activity, is all that’s left to buy and sell after all other plausibly practical vehicles for finance have failed.