With the development of money in the M iddle Ages, the time also came for serious debate about the legitimacy o f credit and of i nterest-beari ng loans. Usury was prohibi ted for Christians and consi dered a morral sin, an act of theft, theft of time, which b elongs o nly to G o d , si nce ' interest charges the time that has elapsed between the loan and its re i m b u rsement' . 1
Today we can easily imagine how this issue might once again call into question the relativi ty of time, o f spacetime and its continuum , which is at the centre of the debates on the future of tomorrow's world economy.
I f this were indeed the case, the futu rism of the instant would make its entry both in THEOLOGY and in the ETHOLOGY of the stock exchange of values, with the poli tical econom ics of speed merging, from then on, with that of the wealth of nations.
M eanwh ile, an event way o utsi de the norm occurred at p recisely 2 . 2 5 pm on 6 May 2010. This was a F LAS H C RAS H , in which the D ow Jones plum meted a thousand poi nts in just a few minutes. For the American Srock Exchange watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Comm ission (S EC) , which disco u nted all proof of human error, computer hacking or cybernetic terro rist attack, this catastro p h i c event urgently imposed the p utti ng in place of harmonized and above all synchron ized circuit-b reakers on a scale covering the ent i re market. Th is was done, as early as n J une, for the electronic trading platforms of Wall S t reet .
THE GREAT ACCELERATOR
1 J acques Le G o fl". L e Moym Age et l "argmt. Paris: Perrin, 2010.
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