Last century, F rench Air Force general , Lionel M ax Chassin, declared : 'The fact that the Earth is round has not yet been taken into account by the m i l i tary . ' It seems that today's economists and fi nanci ers of the Si ngle Market still refuse serio usly to entertain that fact, certain of them even asserting that progress in communications has made the worl d perfectly Bat, 1 like some multimodal logistical platform! H oodwinked by the reality efect of accelerating profits, the speculators of the moment are so mesmerized by STOC K EXCHAN G E screens, they apparently don't notice the deformation of values caused by the cu rved mirror of stock trades in the age of globalization and, so, the 'astronom ical nature of this sudden time comp ressi on that, of course, allows them to make highly impressive p rofits. B u t only at the cost of more and more fragile ' b ub bles' that will soon produce the SYSTEMIC CRAS H of turbocapitalism and, more than anyth ing else, the SECURALISM of speculato rs who will no longer be able to have confidence in the future of the illusion o f progress o r to expect the l atest software to deliver the miracles p romised by the mathematical modelling used by a market subj ect to the excessive speeds o f hyperactive flash tradi ng. The relat ivist felonies co mmi tted by the in sider traders involved in h igh-frequency electronic exchanges will suddenly put the brakes on the hyperl iberal ism of the G reat Casi no, quite as if the speeding-train efect of h igh finance escaped traders and, especially, the N abel Prize winners in econom ics - apparently unlike the planners who laid o ut the railways - as though the insecurity of H i story wasn 't bound, some day, to fatally meet head-o n the insecurity of the territories i nvolved in the nations' emploi du temps - our timetables!
THE GREAT ACCELERATOR
1 Thomas Friedman, 7he World is Flat. Harmondsworrh: Penguin Books, 2005.
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