The long goodbye to 1973 – finance and fiction in Paul Erdman’s The Billion Dollar Sure Thing

Paul Erdman is generally credited with having invented the genre of finance fiction. The former banker wrote his first novel, The Billion Dollar Sure Thing (1973) – this “supernovel about supermoney” as the original cover has it – while incarcerated in a Swiss prison, accused of fraud and gross mismanagement of the Salik Bank. As much as this genre has gained attention in recent years, however, the novels of the 1970s have been neglected to a very large extent, with scholars focusing instead on the finance fiction of the long 1980s (La Berge 2014), or on the novels of Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho, 1991), Don DeLillo (Cosmopolis, 2003), Robert Harris (The Fear Index, 2011) etc. (e.g. Shonkwiler 2017; DeBoever 2018). In this paper, I thus want to trace the genealogy of the genre of finance fiction back to Erdman and his debut novel, which is much more than a historical curiosum. I argue that it provides an interesting and invaluable insight into the financial imaginary at the time, i.e. into the embryonic imaginarium of the financialized world that came into being after Nixon’s abolition of the Bretton Woods system in 1971.