Zero Is a Clenched Fist

Donald MacKenzie

  • BuyOut of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London by Caitlin Zaloom
    Chicago, 224 pp, £18.50, November 2006, ISBN 0 226 97813 3

The new financial trading floor of the Chicago Board of Trade is a striking sight, and Caitlin Zaloom describes it well. Opened in 1997, it occupies a ‘huge stone block’; the trading floor itself is ‘the size of Grand Central Station’, and has no windows or even a public entrance. The walls are ‘unadorned granite, shiny, cold and imposing’, with huge electronic displays of prices, index levels and interest rates running across the top. ‘Diffuse, bright, fluorescent light comes from the fixtures four stories above . . . There are no internal walls to break up the space.’

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