Notes on Sunny

Notes On Sunny

I created the character of Sunny Boudreau in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and beyond. I envisioned her as a former banking employee who had been cast off by the industry, perhaps under a cloud… With her YouTube channel SunnyTalksMoney, she reinvented herself as an accessible instructor, ready to go viral. The character was partly inspired by a guide I encountered on a walking tour of Wall Street in 2010. She had been laid off from a back-office job during the crisis and was now leading tours, her voice amplified by a small speaker attached to her belt. She retained her affection for the industry, her enthusiasm sometimes bubbling over in odd malapropisms and garbled turns of phrase.

Sunny is something of an alter ego for me, more buxom than I am and more attentive to her hair and makeup. Her wardrobe is more flamboyantly feminine than mine. The deregulation of the financial industry and the surging stock market of the 1990’s paralleled an exponential growth in the sale of push-up bras as well as an overall expansion in… food portions, car sizes, homes, atmospheric carbon dioxide and income inequality. Why the exploding demand for an ample, standard-issue bosom ran in tandem with runaway economic development is a question I haven’t been able to answer, but it lingers in my mind. Sunny may also be an echo of the woman who sued Citibank in 2010 for gender discrimination, claiming that she had been fired for being too sexy. (The suit was settled in arbitration, with undisclosed results.)

The bulk of Sunny’s videos are devoted to a twelve-part commemoration of the Federal Reserve’s one hundredth birthday. She also created five stand-alone episodes on a miscellany of monetary issues. She marks the Fed Centennial with a tour, a virtual tour. Due to the highly restrictive security at Fed facilities, she leads us through a building she maintains is “very similar” to the New York Fed. Her presentations are by turns friendly, informative, defensive, flirtatious, confiding, mournful, evasive, embarrassed, defiant, and often incongruously sexualized.

Why? Why talk money? Why the Fed? Why a mock tour? Why the tangle of emotions? Why an unstable presentation? Why a projection of exaggerated femininity? I struggle to answer these questions directly, so for now I’ll recount what is said to be every economist’s favorite joke.

… A physicist, a chemist and an economist are stranded on a desert island with nothing to eat. A can of soup washes ashore. The physicist says, “Let’s smash the can open with a rock.” The chemist says, “Let’s build a fire and heat the can up until it explodes.” The economist says, “First, let’s assume a can opener.”

This joke touches on what struck me most forcefully as I began reading about economics, particularly about crashes and crises. I had always assumed that money and finance were primarily concerned with numbers and counting - which seemed dull and incomprehensible, if vaguely “bad.” As I read, I began to see how primitive my understanding was, that my impression of money systems as concrete, “real” and essentially mathematical – had been obsolete for thousands of years… at least. It wouldn’t come as a revelation to everyone that finance and economics are primarily made of words – sets of assumptions, agreements, inventions – that govern the numbers poured into them, but the more I read, the more amazed I was. Initially startled that finance was a fluid agglomeration of representations conjured by language, I was even more shocked by the nature of these representations, especially as the system became more and more deregulated.

At a time when battles in the culture wars grabbed headlines, the truly shocking and transgressive innovations in representation were being created by financiers, investment bankers, private equity firms, hedge fund managers. Riding the "anything goes" ethos normalized by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher's audacious revisions of economic fair play, these financial artists were creating myriad exotic financial tools – derivatives, off-balance sheet transactions, structured investment vehicles, use of leverage on a staggering scale, esoteric modeling. Numbers function as a smokescreen for these world-changing innovations. They suggest objectivity, rationality, inevitability. And for the math-shy, impenetrability.

Perhaps boredom is another kind of camouflage, like squid ink, a dark diffuse cloud of tedium obscuring our view of financial structures. Accounting has never been considered a particularly exciting or sexy pursuit. More counting. Yawn. It’s right there in the word. And yet, to “give an account” is to tell a story. To “account for one’s actions” is to explain oneself. As Sunny points out in one of her videos, “Yes, a balance sheet has numbers on, quite naturally. But it also has letters, forming words.” She also points out its binary structure “top and bottom” or “left and right.” And it always balances. So, a balance sheet is a symmetrical creation, animated and kept in equilibrium with words… That doesn’t sound boring, it sounds… precarious, supernatural, faith-based, constructed. Like gender presentation, religion, card games and other things. (The word “constructed” derives from the Latin for “heaped together.”)

The financial system is a complex of inventions and attitudes that are swiftly normalized and made to feel inevitable. Does Sunny get at this? Does she hint at the outlandishness of the system? Its uncanny way with words? Or is she too outlandish herself? Does she get across that this concoction remains imaginary and abstract at the top of the system, but as it moves towards the bottom inexorably becomes real and concrete? “If you owe the bank a hundred dollars, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, that’s the bank’s problem.” An alchemy of gold at the top, lead at the bottom. Perhaps she suggests it, but only obliquely… She definitely doesn’t find the dividing line, the crucial point above which credit (belief) is infinitely extended and below which credit (belief) is circumscribed, where homes and cars are repossessed, bodies and minds are worn down, freedom is lost. Maybe because it’s not a line or a point but a wave of intersecting factors. Sunny is swimming in the language of finance, sometimes with relish, sometimes with apparent unease. She may sense something amiss, but her disquiet doesn’t progress to criticism. She plunges ahead with her determination to inform, to explain, even to defend.

In 2003 George W. Bush signed a bill into law that established the national Financial Literacy and Education Commission, with its own website, MyMoney.gov. The phrase "financial literacy" tends to make my blood boil, focused as it is on the "competence" and "behavior" of individuals in their personal financial lives. Often used in a context of patronizing admonitions to the general public to "use credit wisely, pay bills on time, and comparison shop", it is never addressed to the "experts” - the journalists, government officials, and business people whose own financial illiteracy, and/or active mendacity, aid and abet financial catastrophe. That the Commission, tasked with developing a national strategy on financial education aimed at the general - presumably benighted - public, was established in 2003, at a time when the "competence" and "behavior" of the most prominent financial professionals was at the very best questionable, is a bitter irony.

The people most hurt by this economy so often seem to understand it as their own personal failure. The kind of “financial literacy” promoted by MyMoney.gov does nothing to address that misunderstanding. A more productive “financial literacy” would allow the public to read the system and understand its seismic shifts and feints, focusing outward at the nature of economic structures rather than inward at individual behavior. Well, that’s obvious I suppose. And it would contradict the narrative, the culture of American capitalism.

When I first began working on the SunnyTalksMoney series I was hoping to contribute to this more critical kind of financial literacy, to advance it at least incrementally. I think that I didn’t succeed. Sunny got away from me, her position too slippery. A bit like the Fed itself perhaps. Maybe all that I managed to do with Sunny was to mirror the strangeness of financial language and the lack of physical access/transparency available to the general public regarding the workings of the Fed, the Treasury and major financial institutions. The highly secured, heavily weaponized protection of these buildings and the opacity of their public faces (visitors may view artwork and other exhibits completely irrelevant to the organizations’ functioning) always struck me as funny in a way. As the wealth is made of ideas, what are the guards protecting? The desks and computers? Copiers and coffee makers? The staff? Papers? With assumptions and agreements on them? The magic words? I guess so… Or maybe the function of the heavy security is to reinforce an aura of solidity, of realness. If the guards are there… there must be something “real” inside to guard. Not just a heap of language, unstable by its nature and capable of metamorphoses.