Dancing on a roller coaster

Kim Myung-hwa

The author is a playwright and director. 

The market once talked about Kospi 5,000. Before long, the conversation shifted to 8,000. Numbers that had climbed almost vertically suddenly plunged, only to soar again. People borrow against future profits to invest, and the National Pension Service plans to expand its stock holdings. At times, it feels as if the entire society is dancing atop a roller coaster.

In “The Lehman Trilogy” (2013), an epic play by Italian playwright Stefano Massini, Bobby Lehman dances the twist before he dies. The work, later adapted into an award-winning production directed by Sam Mendes, tells the story of Lehman Brothers, the investment bank whose collapse became a symbol of the 2008 global financial crisis. It follows 160 years of rise and decline through the Lehman family, beginning with brothers who immigrated to the United States in the 1840s.

A recurring theme in the play is the growing abstraction of capitalism. The Lehman brothers first settled in Alabama and traded cotton directly. They later moved to New York and shifted toward brokerage and financial intermediation.

What began with cotton expanded into coffee and oil. Yet the focus increasingly moved away from physical goods and toward investment deals. The business eventually reached railroad projects whose completion dates were uncertain and later evolved into finance itself, where money became both the product and the object of trade.

Investment detached from tangible reality requires faith. In that sense, modern financial capitalism resembles a religion. This may explain why the play is filled with religious imagery, from references to the golden calf in the Book of Exodus to other biblical allusions. Profit becomes the deity. Do not doubt. Invest and believe.

Lehman Brothers survived the Great Depression of the 1930s but could not escape the financial crisis of 2008. Yet financial capitalism did not collapse with the subprime mortgage crisis. Instead, it adapted and grew stronger, embracing technology stocks as its new target.

Today, investors continue to place their hopes in industries promising extraordinary futures. Reports that SpaceX has recently entered public markets suggest that speculation has expanded even further, reaching beyond the earth itself.

Perhaps that means investors have taken another step closer to their modern god. Whether that god rewards faith or punishes excess remains uncertain. For now, as markets rise and fall with dizzying speed, one can only hope that everyone riding the roller coaster makes it through safely.