Algorithmic Finance and the Anthropogenic Environmental Crisis in Accelerando: Science of Finance Capital as Catalyst of Climate Change

Abstract

High-frequency trading in financial markets is increasingly discursively related to climate change and produces peculiar iterative patterns of accommodation and reinforcement of environmental externalities. Stock market trades have accelerated at a rate where shares change hands in microseconds. This increases the possibility of systemic crises in markets and the physical environment. The chapter examines how high-frequency trading both reconfigures the dynamics of finance and changes the global financial system in new spatio-temporal ways. Importantly, it produces political ecologies of engagement, divergence, and convergence between the financial and Earth Systems. It examines technological change and algorithmic strategies at stock exchanges as algorithmic financialization intersects the Anthropocene debates on sustainability and social equity. The analysis explains the nature of high-frequency trading strategies and market responses to natural disasters finding that algorithmic economies contribute to worsening environmental crises and, further, financial investment algorithms reflect on climate change to reinforce harmful economic practices instead of mitigating them.