About – Circus Of Finance

About Circu$ of Finance

Circu$ of Finance is an education outreach project of Lisa Leaverton, (inquire within) Ensemble. It is a comedy that chronicles the learning curve of ordinary citizens attempting leaps of daring in exemplifying tricky economics concepts through interpretive circus acts. In lieu of the execution of dangerous acts one would expect to encounter at a ‘circus’, e.g., fire-swallowing, participants reinterpret acts, meanwhile conveying the risks, offering comic entry to participants and audiences with varied experience.

Circus Acts expose mechanisms of wealth extraction

Performers turn to Lion-taming to take on a treacherous concept of ‘supply-side economics.’ A cannonball act exemplifies the head-start for the wealthy, with access to private investment opportunities that result in passive income and special tax breaks.

Juggling America's Economic Mysteries

Despite awareness of inequities, Americans generally lack the ability to explain basic economic concepts, let alone financial activities undertaken in private, and with hordes of financial engineers, quantitative analysts, attorneys, and lobbyists, in the drift of industrial capitalism toward finance capitalism.

Based on my own experience trying to understand what happened during the mortgage crisis, I was curious to explore the question: why is it so hard to see or understand finance and economics? What questions does this raise re: transparency, inclusivity, consent? Public economics education is misleading, defined generally in simplistic, moral terms of ‘financial literacy’, e.g., how to balance your checkbook. I set out to create a non-partisan venue where we could collectively learn about finance and review law or policy proposals associated with various practices.

Background

My focus on economic access began in 2010 as an inquiry into the bailout, resulting in earlier works ‘You Don’t Know Dick”; about strategies used by the affluent for extracting wealth, and ‘Bigger Stakes, Bigger Crimes,’ a Punch and Judy adaptation wherein characters refuse traditional roles and reject traditional crimes such as throwing baby out of the window in favor of more lucrative Wall Street strategies- whether legally sanctioned or illegal.

Taking on a challenge

Finance capitalism is a tricky topic that isn’t sexy and doesn’t immediately evoke a human face. Circus of Finance provides a venue for collective learning and inquiry into issues of inclusivity, transparency and consent and an entry to community dialogue about what value and productivity mean in today’s world, and how, in its convergence with democracy, the creation, extraction, and destruction of value in our current system of finance capitalism affects our lives. Corrective policy is frequently proposed, but largely unknown to citizens uninformed on financial activities. Without informed citizens, there is inadequate pressure on Wall Street.

...Wall Street has increased its dominance over decision making at firms that we think of as nonfinancial. Financial engineering and financial speculation have been rewarded and expanded to the detriment of the “real economy” of producing goods, providing non- financial services, and inventing things. And money has been pushed to shareholders and executives rather than workers.

Lisa Donner, Executive Director

Americans for Financial Reform

Peer through the lens of neoliberalism and you see more clearly how the political thinkers most admired by Thatcher and Reagan helped shape the ideal of society as a kind of universal market (and not, for example, a polis, a civil sphere or a kind of family) and of human beings as profit-and-loss calculators (and not bearers of grace, or of inalienable rights and duties).

Stephen Metcalf

The Guardian