ABSTRACT

It was a time of great tribulation. In 2007 and 2008, as global credit markets seized up, venerable banking and insurance institutions collapsed, and stock prices around the world slid and then tumbled, desperate fi nancial professionals sought supernatural insights into the unimaginable disaster that had befallen them. In London, psychics experienced a dramatic surge in demand for their guidance from City workers (Leach; Mayer). In Paris, Jérôme Kerviel, the rogue trader whose unauthorized market positions would result in losses of €5 billion for the French bank Société Générale and intensify the stress on global markets, turned to clairvoyants in a futile attempt to predict the future. Arrested in January 2008, his fi rst request was not for a lawyer, but for the number of a telephone psychic. Having duly received a remote consultation, Kerviel conceded that he faced a “black future” (Allen). Across the Atlantic, leading US corporations queued to secure the services of Laura Day, another psychic or, in her preferred term, “intuitive” (de Bertodano) and anxious Wall Streeters fl ocked to the healing hands of the fi nancial planner-cum-Tibetan shaman Larry Ford (Blumenfeld). Among the alleged fraudsters indicted by the US Securities and Exchange Commission in the wake of the crisis was “America’s Prophet” and head of the Delphi Investment Group, Sean David Morton, whose claim to have used a “spiritual remote viewing system” to call “ALL the highs and lows of the market giving EXACT DATES for rises and crashes over the last 14 years” persuaded tens of thousands of investors to follow his stock tips, or even, in some cases, to entrust him with their life savings (de la Merced).