Hannah Kuchler, a reporter for the FT, reviews a play about the perils of turning people into financial assets.
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The premise: geeky Austen-obsessed teenage girl gets other people to fund her education by guaranteeing them a portion of her future earnings. So far, so normal – just ask a government which funds colleges with taxes, parents raiding their savings for tuition fees (though they might be lucky to get the cash back), or to some extent – a parallel which playwright Felipe Ossa draws – young women marrying money in Austen novels.
But Emma is one of several nerds from across the country (“the star trek convention” as she calls them) whose combined futures will be bundled together and sold, CDO-style, in different tranches for different risk appetites, to pension funds and retail investors.
Written in 2004, Monetizing Emma would have been just plain geeky before the crash. But in the “new normal” it’s receiving rave reviews and lots of laughs from audiences who can see how difficult, and potentially dangerous, betting on someone’s future income can be.
As Emma’s will to join the scheme wavers, we get a glimpse of how her priorities may be warped if she becomes a financial asset when she marvels at the beauty of Tuscan glassblowing, and tells her mother she’d like to try it. Her mother, desperate to get her hands on the cash, squeals “But high finance can be beautiful too!”
Ossa, a financial journalist by day, casts his bankers in Men in Black outfits, showing them attempting due diligence by pouring over Emma – the Bond Girl’s – exam scores and debating whether her painful shyness curbs her potential (that and her woeful ambitions to study English and become a human rights lawyer…).
Soon enough, Emma has been given a makeover, the bonds are flying off the shelves and the back-stabbing corner office-grabbing begins before anyone has any idea what Emma will eventually be worth.
While the “Genius Trust” bonds may not actually lead to the next crash (as we noted here, there are some aspects of teenage hood that even the most bonus-hungry banker might want to avoid) Ossa does a good job of showing the pride, prejudice and slack regulation that could contribute to it.
Monetizing Emma’s run at the New York Fringe has now finished, but the play intends to show elsewhere soon.
Related link:
Teenage-backed bonds – FT Alphaville