Tuesday 3rd February

The idea of the market is very old.  Farmers would take their produce to market and a price agreed, depending on the shortage of supply or the desperation of need.  Of course, a balance had to be struck between sense and greed; better to sell your perishable foodstuffs at any price than have them rot on your hands.  Then around five hundred years ago banks emerged and money-lending, once the province of kings, became available to many.  Merchants would offer shares in their ventures (often slavery or trade with the colonies) and the banks would fund other (usually rich) men to buy those shares.  Then these shares started to be traded; insider knowledge as always a premium, and the stock markets began to emerge.  Then commodities began to be traded, guano, tobacco, rum and then oil and iron ore.  Then companies sprung up offering shares in railroads, un-built and purely speculative, or for new mines in South America.   In this way many fortunes were won and lost, and yet it still wasn’t enough.  Currencies began to be traded, banks moving vast sums around and gambling on the exchange rates slipping or rising.  Then futures began to emerge; rather than agree to simply buy oil or orange juice or pork bellies, you would buy an option to buy at a certain price at an agreed future date, and you could trade this option with other market hopefuls.

Now everything is traded, currencies, insurance policies, sovereign and personal debt, carbon credits – in fact anything which might have an unknown value at some point in the future is being traded.  It is a huge machine, billions moving electronically each second.  And all of it achieves nothing, except to enrich those involved in the trade.  It produces nothing (except more debt and huge profits).  It increases inexorably the cost of raw materials, especially food and yet at the same time drives down the money paid to farmers while making the cost to poor consumers higher.  It is a vast machine created by the wealthy for the sole purpose of making money, very little of which trickles down.  And it seems we are stuck inside the machine, every one of us, even though most of us are not playing the game we have become its victims.  And so gradually everything becomes a tradable commodity, nothing has any value except that which might be raised if it is traded.  Each year that passes the whole thing becomes more complex as we are all sucked into the machine where eventually we too will be packaged, evaluated and traded.