Markets just a game for glorified gamblers

Much of the act was repealed during the 1980s, and President Bill Clinton did away with its last remnants in 1999, just a few years before the start of the current global depression/economic meltdown.

London’s so-called Big Bang in 1986 had a similar deregulatory effect on UK banks, clearing the way for their full-scale involvement in money market speculation. The New Labour governments of Blair and Brown continued to deregulate with fervour and helped create the situation we are in today.

After giving due consideration to the goldfish-like powers of recall exhibited by Paxman and his expert guests, I concluded that I, in fact, know enough about economics and finance to be going on with. The jargon I dismiss as a confusing, ever-changing distraction, largely incidental to the few overriding realities outlined below.

Most of the people who pontificate on macro-money matters are involved in a game of semi-educated guessing, so it doesn’t really matter whether they describe themselves as economists or finance experts.

Aside even from the flim-flam merchants and self-promoting bullshit artists, of which among this particular type of expert there seems to be a higher than usual proportion, their views are no more to be relied upon than those of a horse-racing tipster in a daily newspaper. If anything, they are far less reliable.

A tipster only has to take into account breeding, age and form of the horses in a race, factor in the weight each will carry and the jockeys, weather and racecourse conditions, before making his, usually wrong, prediction.

An economist/finance expert has to consider an infinitely greater range of potentially influencing factors before making a semi-educated, and almost invariably wrong, guess at probable outcomes.

The horse-racing analogy can be stretched to include the investment bankers and other money-market traders and shysters, who are little more than glorified gamblers, albeit that they play for much higher stakes than the average racecourse or betting shop habitues. Besides scale, the most vital distinction is that they always gamble with someone else’s money.

I still know virtually nothing about economics and finances, except for one crucial thing: neither, when it comes down to it, does anyone else.