"...prior episodes like the Great Depression and the Asian crisis were retroactively transformed into prophetic events, such that ongoing efforts at crisis management appeared as the filling out or fulfillment of a destiny already inscribed into the story of global finance. This is a truly strange and uneasy deliverance from the terror of history. In one sense, the return to the past provides a vital anchor for global projects of crisis management, effectively reestablishing financial history as a terrain on which to act. At the same time though, it lays open how such projects themselves depend on a kind of magic trick. While efforts at crisis management appear to have the truth of history on their side, this truth can emerge only through a ritual practice in which both history and crisis are conjured into being through their self-reference. The return to the past in this way functions as a secular form of revelation, repeated in the face of trauma to sustain history as a mode of power."
Amin Samman History in Financial Times (2019) p.91
