‘Here in Venezuela and the rest of Latin America we were being taken over by the savage project of neo-liberalism with its claim that there’s a hidden hand which regulates the market. It’s a lie, a lie! A lie a thousand times over! Of course there are alternatives and we in Venezuela we are proving it!’ The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Chavez: Inside the Coup, Chavez to crowd, 2003
Since the ’60s news from the City has mattered to more and more people. Between St Paul’s and Tower Bridge lies the City of London and its marketplaces. No-one makes anything here except money. For this is capitalism’s heart: one square mile of offices, typewriters and telephones. Inside Story: The Market, BBC 1976
Banks: there are over 250 of them in the City. ibid.
The Stock Exchange in its fine new plumage is capitalism’s holy of holies. ibid.
‘The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.’ ibid. Karl Marx
‘The largest foreign exchange market in the world.’ ibid.
At the heart of non-life insurance are men of substance called Lloyds of London. A Lloyds underwriter makes his living from betting you your disaster won’t happen. If it does, the underwriter who’s put his name to the risk must pay out down to the shirt on his back. ibid.
Every day the discount houses scour the banks for idle money. ibid.
The health of the market is monitored with a morbid precision. ibid.
‘It’s a battle zone.’ Inside Story: Fish Tales, trader, BBC 1999
Billingsgate in the heart of London’s East End is the country’s largest inland fish market. For over a thousand years it’s been home to generations of nocturnal fish devotees whose unique passion for selling fish still flourishes today. ibid.
Market life starts around midnight but selling can’t start until five. ibid.
To move fish around the market you have to be a specially licensed porter. There are 100 permanent porters and 20 casuals. Casuals turn up on the off-chance of a day’s work. ibid.
God is dead. But the market is immortal. The New Statesman s3e6: Profit of Boom, ITV 1991
We are now living in a magical time where still to this day bad news – bad economic news – is often considered by the markets to be good news because it just means there’s more government intervention on the way. They won’t let it collapse. The Corbett Report, Melody Cedestrom, ‘Money Magic and the Scramble for Africa’, James Corbett online 2018
Gamestop: One of the most spectacular stock market faceoffs in living memory. Even the White House got drawn into the sage. The Corbett Report: The Markets are Rigged, James Corbett online 2021
But the revelation that retail investors are fighting a rigged game against the Wall Street hedge fund behemoths is hardly a revelations at all. ibid.
The stock market was never meant to bring riches and fortune to the average investor. ibid.
In 2014 the Bank for International Settlements warned that central banks were causing elevated asset prices. ibid.
At base it’s a con game where the rich and powerful employ a raft of confidence men to lure suckers into the latest market mania. ibid.
Those with advanced knowledge of world events continue to profit from their insider information. ibid.
The unusual trading in the weeks to 9/11 were ‘consistent with insiders anticipating the 9/11 attacks’. ibid.
After an initial sell-off a late-afternoon rally by a mystery buyer would reassure the markets. ibid.
For over 150 years, the Chicago trading floors have been home to the most primal method of buying and selling. In 1997 more than 10,000 people traded on the floors. Later that year, computer trading emerged. Today, about 10% remain. Floored, 2009
‘Chicago: it’s physical’ … ‘You saw the worst in everyone’ … ‘The physicality in the pit was ridiculous’ … ibid.
Futures Trading 101: ‘for buyers and sellers to manage the risk against unpredictable price fluctuations.’ ibid.
Many traders trade with their own money. ibid.
‘There’s a gambling mentality to what we do down there.’ ibid. trader
‘95% now of all global markets are electronic.’ ibid. Linda Raschke, LBR Group
Transitioning from an inflationary world to a deflationary world – people should be scared. There is going to be disruption and that disruption is coming no matter what. There is nothing fundamental that governments can do to stop the rate of technology progress. Jeff Booth, interview The Keiser Report August 2020, author ‘The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future’
You have technology moving at an exponential pace driving prices down, and governments all around the world [are] caught in an inflationary trap that they created themselves out of monetary policy, fighting that force. And I would ask a simple question – isn’t it good when the value of your money goes up, and prices go down? ibid.
The abundance of technology would be broadly distributed. ibid.
It’s not going to go on for ever no matter what … It doesn’t matter until it does. One giant thing they miss that this is they assume a reserve currency goes on for ever, right, and you can just keep printing and people just trust in your currency. ibid.
What if a country, let’s say China, created a currency and decided to keep on printing for ever, and they used the currency and they used it to buy the world? … Would we trust that currency? ibid.
And so you can see from that thought experiment that if you just keep on printing money, people lose faith in your currency, and so you don’t have a reserve currency any more. So there’s a whole bunch of people like I think are like brainwashed in this ‘debt doesn’t matter’, that this can go on for ever. And it’s going to happen gradually … There is nothing that can stop this. We are going to have deflation for sure. Structurally, technology requires it. The path to get to deflation could end up through hyper-inflation first – currency default, debt default – it could happen a whole bunch of different ways but we are going to have deflation anyhow. ibid.
The concentration of wealth because you’re fighting a natural force – Capitalism can’t work, right, so effectively the Government is the market today. Free market principles don’t work any more. ibid.
Deflation we’ve never seen in our lifetimes. What if next year everything around you got cheaper? All it does is increase the value of your savings, and decrease the value of your assets. ibid.
Why do you think the top five technology companies are at historic heights? ibid.
Everybody knows it. ibid.
More band-aids on a systematic, a structural change that has to take place. And so what they’re really trying to stop is a revolution, right, but they’re making the revolution more likely. ibid.
Finding the Future in Radical Rural America: The problem is not capitalism; it is our markets. Markets that Obama screwed up … The political problem we face today – in Appalachia and elsewhere – boils down to a debate over socialism versus capitalism, but to something simpler. Obama was a really important president at a pivotal moment in history, where a financial crisis gave him wide latitude to restructure our social obligations. And he screwed it up. Some 10 million foreclosures and no Wall Street felons. There are a lot of other ways he restructured society to make it less free and more unequal. For example, because of the way bailouts were structured, black-owned banks were a tenth likely to get bailout money as other banks. Obama’s antitrust officials allowed mergers in telecoms, pharmaceuticals, airlines, and tech platforms, concentrating power in radical ways. Obama negotiated a bill to hand over Puerto Rico to hedge funds. And what did Obama do about opioids in rural America? A friend of mine in the administration told me that when the White House finally noticed the AIDS-level epidemic deaths too, the suggestions proferred were … roundtables. She might have been exaggerating, but not by much … The gist is that Obama reorganized our markets to push wealth and power upward, and to subvert our liberties. It is not, however, a complex one. In 2008 we thought we were electing Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but really we elected Herbert Hoover. Matt Stoller, Boston Review online, cited Keiser Show 2020
What made the scale of suffering so obscene was that it happened during a time of grain surplus in other parts of India. But so fanatically devoted to the iron law of the market was the government that it refused to liberate those supplies for fear it would artificially bring down prices. So common sense not to mention common humanity were sacrificed to the fetish of the market and millions were abandoned to perish. Simon Schama, A History of Britain: The Empire of Good Intentions, BBC 2000
There’s no such thing as a free market without the government making the rules of the game. Saving Capitalism, 2017
Tulips: the Dutch started buying tulip bulbs like lottery tickets. They knew all about speculation … This was the world’s first great speculative bubble. A pound of tulips were now changing hands for the price of a house, a farm, a pair of ships … The tulip market had collapsed in just four days. Andrew Marr’s History of the World V: Age of Plunder, BBC 2012
Mexico City: 1,000 tianguis or open-air markets. World’s Busiest Cities s1e2, BBC 2017
Through the summer of 1976 Arab oil money continued to leave London. The heads of Arab banks now became powerful figures ... Denis Healey began a series of savage cuts in public expenditure. It was the only way he believed for Britain to get a loan from the IMF and avoid bankruptcy. But it was clear to many in his party that he had given away control of the economy to the markets. Adam Curtis, The Mayfair Set I: Who Pays Wins ***** Channel 4 1999
The summer of 1976 was one of the hottest on record. Berkeley Square in Mayfair became infested by a plague of caterpillars. They got everywhere even inside the Clermont Club. One of the few Clermont members left in London that summer was James Goldsmith … Goldsmith was suing the satirical magazine Private Eye. Adam Curtis, The Mayfair Set III: Destroy the Technostructure