ABSTRACT
Speculation has long loomed large in the cultural and legal imagination. Hoarding agricultural commodities to profit from rising prices in times of scarcity was forbidden in ancient Greece and Rome. Speculation was frequently equated with gambling, with both condemned on moral and religious grounds. Speculation was deplored not merely because it seemed to be gambling by any other name, but also because it destabilized the social order, "weakening government, diverting capital, creating a monopoly, and perversion by luxury”. If speculation is distinguished from investment by being short-term, then this is a speculative regime measured in nanoseconds. At the same time, the scale of financial trading in the realm of shadow banking is beyond ordinary imagination. Speculation invokes a temporal acceleration, and the formal analogue in Dickens's novel is narrative suspense, that leads readers to race forward in their reading for the plot.
