Making a Killing

Mikkel Krause Frantzen discusses the future of the financial thriller in an era of cryptocurrencies and climate crisis.

By Mikkel Krause FrantzenOctober 2, 2025

• Economics and Finance

• Literary Criticism

• Fiction

IN APRIL, I WAS in London, and on the Tube I saw a man checking his stocks on an app. He wasn’t the only one nervously watching as his pension savings disappeared or were reduced beyond recognition. After Donald Trump’s tariffs sent the stock market crashing in early April 2025, we witnessed the worst three consecutive days since Black Monday in October 1987. I checked my Nordnet app too. Shit.

It was nerve-racking but not exactly surprising—I was in London to promote a new book, Finance Aesthetics: A Critical Glossary, which I had co-edited. So I was well aware that financial capitalism is volatility incarnate. It goes up. It goes down. I also knew that finance today isn’t confined to Wall Street or boardrooms or spreadsheet cells. Everyone is entangled in the financial web—through mortgages, pension funds, student debt, and investment apps.

I knew, in other words, that we live in a world where finance is not only about profit but also about power over people and the planet. We live in a world with HFT and NFTs, quants and algorithms, cryptocurrencies and bitcoins; with the global foreign exchange market size reaching $753.2 billion in 2022; with BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street (the so-called “Big Three” within passive index funds) managing trillions and trillions of dollars; and with yet another attack on the American dollar, which nevertheless continues to function as the world’s currency, etcetera, etcetera.

We live in a world where, especially after the financial crisis of 2007–08, it is clearer than ever that finance, in the words of Adrienne Buller’s The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism (2022), is “a world-making force.” To quote Hernan Diaz’s 2022 novel Trust: “[F]inance is the thread that runs through every aspect of life.”

In this world, entire neighborhoods and even whole cities are being bought up by investment firms and global capital funds (like Blackstone)—in Venice, Italy; in Copenhagen, Denmark; in London; and in Berlin, where “€40bn of housing assets are now in institutional portfolios, 10% of the total housing stock.” As the geographer Brett Christophers shows in Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World (2023), these companies increasingly own the infrastructures we all rely on: housing, roads, hospitals. We think we’re living in a municipality, but in truth we’re living in a marketized model. We think we live in a public space, but in reality we live in a portfolio.

In this world, an American president is in the process of dismantling federal oversight of cryptocurrencies while simultaneously building a sprawling, family-owned crypto empire. Just days before his inauguration, he launched his own $TRUMP meme coin, which in no time generated over $350 million. In this world, in September 2021, El Salvador became the first country to adopt Bitcoin—the most well-known cryptocurrency—as legal tender, but this experiment has already ended in a chaotic crypto-collapse. In this world, a guy called Erick Brimen is in the process of building the crypto-based city of the future on the tropical island of Roatán, Honduras, together with like-minded ultralibertarians. In this world, consultants (and former British prime minister Tony Blair) entertain visions of a Gaza Riviera, “with artificial islands off the coast akin to those in Dubai, blockchain-based trade initiatives, a deep water port to tie Gaza into the India-Middle East-Europe economic corridor, and low-tax ‘special economic zones,’” while Greenland is considered “the best place in the world for data centers” and ideal for bitcoin-mining operations, which is why real estate in Greenland has already been tokenized.

And then there is Mars …

This is our present. This is the plan of the financial elite and the world’s most powerful people. Meanwhile, these people are also busy preparing for the apocalypse—an apocalypse they are helping to accelerate. And the business of business goes on—which also means the business of betting on catastrophe, of “turn[ing] calamity into capital.”

This is the financial thriller we’re all living in. To understand this world, we need to understand the literary genre of the financial thriller.

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As a genre, the financial thriller was born behind bars. Its founding father, Paul Erdman, was a Canadian banker who found himself in a Swiss prison for fraud and forgery. With nothing but time on his hands, he began writing. The result was The Billion Dollar Sure Thing (1973), a fast-paced novel of international finance in which oil sheikhs, Wall Street operators, and European central bankers speculate on currencies in a newly unstable world economy. “[S]peculation in foreign exchange has become such a popular sport,” one character quips. “It’s the best game in town.”

Just two years earlier, on August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon had stunned the world by ending the dollar’s convertibility into gold, effectively dismantling the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. He justified the move in dramatic terms, declaring the need to protect the dollar from the “attacks of international money speculators,” an all-out assault on American economic sovereignty. Almost overnight, money lost its anchor (of course, the abolition had been years in the making). The dollar floated, currencies began to swing wildly against each other, and speculation in foreign exchange exploded. What had once been the preserve of governments and central banks was suddenly open terrain for traders, corporations, and, soon enough, novelists.

The financial thriller of the 1970s grew out of this new volatility. Its central motifs—the holy trinity of dollars, gold, and oil—mapped directly onto the decade’s crises. The collapse of fixed exchange rates and the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 were not separate stories but interconnected dramas of finance and energy. As historian Helen Thompson argues in Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century (2022), the end of the Bretton Woods framework cannot be separated from the decline of American energy dominance, the rising significance of an international dollar credit system, and sharply increased levels of debt. If traditional economic histories often treat Bretton Woods and the oil crisis as parallel but distinct events, the financial thriller—by weaving oil barons, bankers, and money speculators into a unified plot—showed how deeply entwined they were.

After Erdman’s unlikely prison-born success, the financial thriller quickly turned into a recognizable literary field. Erdman himself consolidated his reputation with The Silver Bears (1974) and The Crash of ’79 (1976), both bestsellers in their own right. Other writers soon followed: Arthur Hailey offered a melodramatic inside look at American banking with The Moneychangers (1975), Jocelyn Davey’s A Treasury Alarm (1976) staged a crisis inside Britain’s treasury, and Michael M. Thomas’s Green Monday (1980) dissected Wall Street culture. Even Jeffrey Archer, who would later become a prominent conservative politician, and Ken Follett, who would go on to a career as a best-selling novelist, first experimented with financial plots—Archer with Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less (1976) and Follett (under the pseudonym Zachary Stone) with Paper Money (1977).

Of course, finance as such is nothing new. Centers of global finance have been a feature of the modern world, from the city-state of Genoa in the 15th and 16th centuries to Amsterdam in the 17th, London in the 19th, and New York in the 20th. Nor are literary works with a strong interest in economic and financial matters unprecedented: from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1600) to Goethe’s Faust (1806, 1832), from Honoré de Balzac’s César Birotteau (1837) to Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier (1912). Yet what united the books published in the 1970s was the sense that global finance had suddenly become both unstable and thrilling—an arena where political power, economic speculation, and narrative suspense converged. And what made them a genre were their shared themes (money, gold, and oil), characters (speculators and other moneymen), and plot structures (volatile and affective thrill rides of financial chicanery), as well as their persistent tendency to simplify political and economic issues into moral dilemmas.

The financial thriller was, by and large, finance’s self-portrait, its own dream-image. At times, it even entered into a feedback loop with the world of finance, and the boundary between financial fiction and financial fact became exceedingly porous. Erdman, for example, was taken seriously by bankers and policymakers, his novels discussed in the same breath as the work of economic analysts. He was profiled by energy historian Daniel Yergin, cited as an authority in the financial press, and, when he died in 2007, commemorated by Nancy Pelosi as “one of the leading financial minds of the 20th century.” In the 1970s, finance thrillers circulated alongside an array of financial publications, including business journalism, stock market reports, money guides, economic textbooks, and newsletters. They were part of what Leigh Claire La Berge, in her 2014 book Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s, has called “financial print culture.”

As I argue in my own new book The Birth of the Financial Thriller: Making a Killing in the 1970s, “the financial thrillers of the 1970s were not only fictions of financialisation. The financial thriller was also a fiction, or a genre, for the financialised publishing industry.” In other words, the genre was from the outset meant to be bought, consumed, and traded like the financial products it described. The idea that financial literature could be a lucrative enterprise was not lost on contemporary novelists outside the genre either. Don DeLillo, in Great Jones Street (1973), has a character dream aloud about “Fi-nance. Financial writing. Books and articles for millionaires and potential millionaires. The floodgates are opened and the words are pouring out. Financial literature. Handled right it’s a goddamn gold mine, relatively speaking.”

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Born in the convulsions of the early 1970s, the genre of the financial thriller thrived on the volatility of money suddenly cut loose from gold, on oil shocks and speculative manias, on a sense of world order dissolving into floating currencies and geopolitical uncertainty. But genres, like markets, have cycles. The question, then, is what happened to the financial thriller after its heyday in the 1970s—and what might still lie ahead for the form.

By the early 1980s, the moment that had nourished the classic financial thriller was already fading. Currency speculation and the holy trinity of gold, oil, and dollars had been overshadowed by new dramas: corporate raiders, junk bonds, hostile takeovers, insider trading scandals. The figure of the swashbuckling speculator was replaced in the cultural imagination by the ruthless corporate shark, a transition simultaneously portrayed and pushed by Hollywood: Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (1987), for example, or Richard Gere’s Edward Lewis (and Jason Alexander’s Philip Stuckey) in Pretty Woman (1990).

Novelists who had once tried their hand at the genre often drifted elsewhere. Erdman kept churning out financial thrillers, but he never quite recovered his 1970s reputation as a prophet. Arthur Hailey abandoned finance for pharmaceuticals and other topics. Ken Follett traded stockbrokers for medieval cathedrals. Jeffrey Archer became better known for his scandals than for his novels. The gold rush of the 1970s turned out to be just that for the genre: a brief boom, followed by a bust.

And yet, declaring the financial thriller dead would be premature. Like the markets it depicts, the genre has proved remarkably adaptable. If the 1970s thrillers mapped the shocks of Bretton Woods and OPEC, later novels tackled the dramas of deregulation, derivatives, and dot-com bubbles. The financial crisis of 2007–08 offered a new ignition point. The collapse of Lehman Brothers, the spectacle of subprime mortgages packaged into toxic securities, the sight of Wall Street titans begging Washington for bailouts—all of this was key fodder for the financial thriller. It is no coincidence that a wave of new titles appeared in the years after the crash: The Fear Index (2011) by Robert Harris; The Prince of Risk (2013) by Christopher Reich, a former banker in Zurich; Fartblinda (2016) and Gränslösa (2017) by Swedish journalist Carolina Neurath; and The Darlings (2012) and The Banker’s Wife (2018) by Cristina Alger, a former analyst at Goldman Sachs.These novels show that the financial thriller, while no longer a best-selling form, has not disappeared. If Erdman and Hailey once appeared on the very top of the charts, today’s financial thrillers occupy a more modest niche, often produced by ex-bankers or brokers who trade in insider authority.

In more recent years, though, the financial thriller has witnessed a decline. One reason is structural: as a form, the thriller thrives on speed, tension, and volatility—qualities that markets once embodied in spectacular crashes. But the aftermath of 2008 has been stagnation as much as crisis: years of low interest rates, quantitative easing, and what many economists call “secular stagnation.” As scholars such as Annie McClanahan have pointed out, crashes are easy to narrate, while stagnation is not. Suspense requires sudden reversals, not the slow grind of austerity. To put it differently: The thriller is the genre of booms and busts, of economic rise and fall, but how does one tell a thrilling story about zero growth, about flat lines on a graph?

Another reason for the decline of the form is technology. The drama of the trading floor—the shouts, the hand signals, the feverish masculine energy—was once the natural theater of financial suspense. But in an age of high-frequency trading, when algorithms execute millions of trades in milliseconds, when money is less a stack of bills than a string of code, the spectacle of finance has become, it would appear, almost invisible. How to narrate a thriller about spreadsheets, server farms, and obscure derivatives that no one, not even their inventors, fully understands? Or, to paraphrase a point made in Brett Scott’s 2022 book Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets: How can the genre persist in an era in which money exists in digital and intangible forms, where bankers are not at all what they used to be, and where “a great deal of large-scale financial crime occurs using straightforward bank transactions”?

This may explain why some of the most prominent financial thrillers in recent years are not novels at all but works of narrative nonfiction. Tom Wright and Bradley Hope’s Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World (2018) certainly reads like a financial thriller. It tells the story of a young Malaysian financier, Jho Low, who siphons billions from a sovereign wealth fund, buys Basquiats and yachts, hosts champagne-soaked parties on the French Riviera, becomes friends with Leonardo DiCaprio and bankrolls (of all movies) The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)—all before the fraud collapses, like the proverbial house of cards.

Billion Dollar Whale is just one example of the nonfiction financial thriller. Other blockbuster examples include Zeke Faux’s Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall (2023), Dan McCrum’s Money Men: A Hot Start-Up, a Billion-Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth (2022), and Oliver Bullough’s Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back (2018). In my book, I conclude that this literary boom not only signals that the financial thriller has become a gold mine for journalists, who manage to marry their professional obsession with documents and evidence with the thriller’s logic of suspense and conspiracy. It also marks a near-inevitable evolution for the financial thriller, which from its inception in the 1970s fused fiction and fact, literature and journalism, entertainment and education. In that sense, the nonfiction version of the financial thriller remains simultaneously profitable for its authors and popular among readers who hunger for both outrage and excitement.

The nonfiction financial thrillers mentioned above set out to map, in their hybrid form, the labyrinthine world of offshore accounts, shell companies, and arcane derivatives—our contemporary “moneyland”—while still delivering the relentless momentum of a page-turner. All of them accept, too, the ideological premise that financial capitalism itself is the ultimate thriller—one whose twists and turns, as a reviewer of The Billion Dollar Sure Thing observed back in 1973, “not only outstrip fiction but […] outrun journalism as well.”

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From The Billion Dollar Sure Thing to Billion Dollar Whale, the conclusion is hard to avoid that the ultimate thriller is financial capitalism itself. In 2025, we are no longer merely reading financial thrillers; we are living in one. At this point, we are, so to speak, all characters in a bad financial thriller. And the next chapter—perhaps the last—is already being written.

Another financial crisis is lurking just around the corner. According to many economic analysts, it will likely once again be the housing market that bursts. This time, though, the cause will be climatic rather than purely financial: wildfires in California, floods in Florida, heat waves in Texas. Insurance companies have already hiked rates or even pulled the plug in several places. As a result, people will be left with houses they can no longer insure, which will lead to plummeting home values and rising debt, then to bankruptcies among banks and insurance companies, and finally to full-blown economic recession—a development that will only accelerate as the weather gets worse and the disasters more frequent. “Climate-driven financial havoc,” asserts the Financial Times, “could be more menacing than past financial chaos.” We are approaching a so-called “climate Minsky moment,” where ecological tipping points will be mirrored by economic ones: permafrost and pension funds, ice caps and inflation, storms and state budgets.

In other words, the plot has permuted. As the genre of the financial thriller adjusts to the new realities of digital money, planetary crisis, and political authoritarianism, its protagonists will not be traders but coders, not oil sheikhs but climate refugees, not Swiss bankers but algorithm designers. What had once seemed a familiar drama of markets rising and falling has mutated into something darker and stranger. It is no longer a story of dollars, oil, and money but rather of wildfires and floods, of stranded assets and collapsing markets, of the financialization of everything from water rights to carbon credits, and of libertarian plans to pepper the globe with “start-up cities” from Greenland to Gaza.

As for the question of genre, the thriller may be turning into horror: an endgame where the apocalypse has become a business plan, and vice versa, and where finance and fascism, finally, converge.

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This essay is based on Mikkel Krause Frantzen’s book The Birth of the Financial Thriller: Making a Killing in the 1970s (Edinburgh University Press, 2025).