Investable!

A critical and sobering look at how international bankers and investors turn pandemics into investment opportunities, and what we stand to lose when we rely on “innovative finance.”

In a world increasingly defined by crisis, bankers and investors behind the scenes turn catastrophes like pandemics into financial securities that can be bought and sold. Offering new insights into how the excesses of capitalism shape pandemic preparedness, Investable! is an ethnography of World Bank bonds designed to solve a big-ticket global health problem by getting international investors to gamble on future crises. In this first book-length treatment of pandemic bonds, award-winning medical anthropologist Susan Erikson explains how we got here and asks who should hold the responsibility for the terrible things that happen to people, at a time when pandemics are turned into casinos.

Erikson, who traveled over 300,000 miles conducting research for the book, takes readers from the red clay roads of West Africa to the concrete sidewalks of New York City and London’s financial districts, telling the stories of the people, the special interests, and the logics of pandemic bonds. Original, insightful, and extremely timely, Erikson's lively interdisciplinary exploration tells readers in powerful, vibrant prose about the pitfalls of contemporary global health finance “solutions.” Written for a smart general audience concerned about capitalism’s effect on human health, Investable! will appeal to financiers; politicians; economists; people working in global development, health care, and international affairs; and anyone who wants to better understand how capitalism affects how we care for one another in times of crisis.Setting the Stage
1 The World’s Most Controversial Investment
2 What are Pandemic Bonds?
3 Sierra Leone, a.k.a. Salone
Front Stage
4 The Bank that Took Pandemics to Wall Street
5 Personality Matters: Jim Yong Kim
6 The Designers: Treasury, Health, & Development Finance
Back Stage
7 The Business of Insurance-Linked Securities
8 Modeling Danger
9 The Data: Who Cares?
Afterword"[A] compelling case for treating this misguided financial product as a cultural artifact — one that reflects the values, assumptions, and contradictions of a particular global order." – Jacobin“With stunning clarity, Erikson shows that when health risk becomes a site of financial speculation for private investors, the relation between global capitalism and public health moves to new and disturbing territory.”
—Julie Livingston, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU and MacArthur Fellow

“A brilliant analysis of a piece of the global health and financial system that has rarely been discussed or illuminated but that has enormous social implications. With lively and accessible prose, Erikson provides a powerful three-dimensional account of how pandemic bonds emerged and sheds light on how the global health system does (or does not) work today. Highly recommend.”
—Gillian Tett, editorial board member and cofounder of the Moral Money column at the Financial Times, and Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, UKSusan Erikson is a medical anthropologist and Distinguished Professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where she studies complex political and economic systems that shape human health.