Declan Lynch: The only gamblers who never, ever lose
Money-men, who are orchestrating the rise and fall of financial markets, are just having a bet, says Declan Lynch
Hunter S Thompson described the music business as "a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs". And he added: "There's also a negative side."
Thompson's views on "the markets" and the financial services sector in general are not known. Perhaps not even he had words which could convey the irredeemably evil nature of that industry.
But let us put it like this: the music business may have been a cruel and shallow money trench, but sometimes, at the end of it , they were producing Blood On The Tracks, not Credit Default Swaps or Contracts For Difference.
And sometimes, at the end of it, when they took a gamble, they lost. Yes, they actually put their money into the discovery of talent, and they lost it, and that was that.
The money-men, by contrast, are gamblers who can't lose. For the last few years, they have been orchestrating the fall of entire countries and ancient civilisations, and all we ask, is that the deal should go something like this: if they lose money, it is they who actually lose the money. Not us.
But apparently it doesn't work like that. Indeed by about 8 o'clock most mornings, we have heard numerous voices telling us that "the markets don't like uncertainty".
The markets don't like anything these days. But for them not to like uncertainty is to bring us some distance down that cruel and shallow trench, that long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs -- it even reveals to us, some of the negative side.
Uncertainty, after all, is not just the first law of existence. In the context of the markets, you would think it is the only law. These guys, after all, are having a bet here.
To say that they don't like uncertainty is to suggest that the only thing we can offer, them, that they will like, is certainty.
So what they are looking for here, apparently, is reward without risk. They want free money.
In fact, they want all the money in the world. And more. And they are in the process of getting it.
It is now 18 months since I noted that in the formation of the present British government, all the parties were aware that arrangements must be made quickly because "the markets don't like uncertainty".
And what the markets don't want, the markets don't get.
At that time, I advocated the introduction of a sort of Section 31 to keep the money-men off the airwaves. Gangsters love gangster movies, likewise "the markets" love to hear about the chaos they are causing in the lives of the civilian population with their psychotic pursuit of other people's money.
Yet because the nature of this terrorism is officially unrecognised, we can't even get these people off the radio. Instead they are able to promulgate their heathen gibberish, their ideology which is as discredited and as demented as nationalism, communism, and even fascism itself.
Here was Great Britain, after all, not the Sudan, forming its new government in open fear of the City. Since then, it seems that half the countries of Europe have got rid of governments in which "the markets had lost confidence", with even grand old nation-states such as Italy getting done over the weekend, in order to be pleasing to the markets which would be opening on the Monday morning. And who wouldn't like it anyway.
Britain, meanwhile, seems to be leaving Europe altogether due to the lack of "safeguards" for the City.
Safeguards eh?
The civilised world is in a state of anguish, powerless to protect itself against the constant attacks of "the markets", and it is "the markets" who need safeguards?
Of course, the abasement of the political class and of advanced societies in general before the money-men had happened long before David Cameron.
No one man created this particular cruel and shallow money trench, though a deeply influential figure was Alan Greenspan, perhaps the J Edgar Hoover of the modern era, the great technocrat who bamboozled even Bill Clinton with all the things he knew, and who gave a sort of intellectual endorsement to the triumph of the free market, the pursuit of free money.
And after it had all gone horribly, hideously, obscenely wrong, this being America, they called Greenspan to explain himself before Congress, the same sort of folks indeed, who used to gasp with awe at Greenspan's displays of genius when he would lower the interest rate by another quarter-of-a-per cent -- back then I used to think that if I were a genius, I would want to be doing more with it than that, but anyway ...
This is what Greenspan said: "I have found a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works... so to speak".
So the markets may have lost confidence in everything. But in finding that "flaw", you could say that Alan Greenspan himself had lost confidence in the markets.
At last, he was right.
- Declan Lynch
Originally published in
