The market. An exciting place, an intriguing experience. A wonderful invention – ten thousand years ago, or maybe earlier. We can still be pleasantly entertained when we travel to a foreign country where the tradition survives with its turbulent vitality. Or when, closer to home, we find one that still offers some of the oldfashioned charm.
When markets were born, travel was difficult, slow and dangerous. People could only walk – or ride a horse or a camel (or a raft or a canoe along a river, some of the bravest risking to cross the sea.)
Humanity had been learning, for several millennia, that not everybody is good at doing everything. The best way isn’t to train everyone to do the same things, but to specialize and help each other. It was later discovered that it’s even better to look beyond the limits of one’s tribe or neighborhood, widen the exchange to involve others, who know how to find, or grow, or make, something different.
The new discovery was barter. But there was more. In addition to exchanging goods and tools (as well as the knowledge of how to make and use them) there was the curiosity of meeting different people. The newborn markets were an opportunity for entertainment. Soon came comedians and performers, jugglers and jesters, artists and musicians, storytellers and bearers of news, true or legendary, from remote, real or imaginary places.
There were parties and dances, jokes and games, courtship and seduction, passionate love stories or hasty sex affairs, contributing to the biologic need for gene diversity (though nobody knew the laws of evolution.)
There were scribes and thinkers, teachers and scientists. Soothsayers and wizards. But also, of course, tricksters and cheats. Thieves and conjurers. Brawls and fights. Whores and pimps. Murderers, maniacs and mercenary soldiers. Wandering warriors who weren’t always killing dragons or saving damsels in peril.
There were also drugs and poisons, miasmas and filth, parasites and bacteria, bearers of contagion – some people died, but those who survived developed new immunity.
It was anyhow, for everyone, a party. An opportunity to break the cycle of habit, move out of monotony and isolation. Without markets and merchants we would be missing the richness of culture and diversity that is a necessary ingredient of human evolution.
* * *
Then somebody (we don’t really know who, where and when) invented money. A pretty useful tool. But also the origin of new problems, as we are taught by economy historians and we know from the vicious atrocities and hideous violence caused by an exaggerated, often demented, craving for the accumulation of richness.
(A relatively small, but insidious, variation of this disease
is explained in Harpagon’s miseries.)Early in history, the strongest merchant cultures defined a shared standard – based on two attractive and rare metals, gold and silver. Though often manipulated or falsified, it worked for millennia. Until, forty years ago, after a number of international debates and conventions, the “gold standard” was abolished. Money, in international exchange, became an abstract notion. A conventional yardstick that works only if everyone agrees on the same criteria and sticks to the rules. With a substantial advantage for whoever knows how to twist them.
In the meantime, in the eighteenth century, another financial device was born. The stock exchange. The concept is simple and reasonable. Those who need money for investment sell shares in their business. Those who wish to grow their savings buy, and expect to gain a share in the profits.
In practice, it never was so reliable. Since the beginning there were manipulations, swindles and hazards. But the soundest part of the system, based on permanently reliable enterprises, worked fairly well for a long time. Until, thirty years ago, the whole machinery broke down.
* * *
It wasn’t a careless mistake, nor an accident. Quite deliberately, a drastic “deregulation” in the early eighties wiped away all discipline and control. The impact of savagely unleashed financial gambling, they promised, would magically make everybody rich. It was soon obvious that things were going in the opposite direction. But the dementia had quickly become chronic. So widely spread as to wipe out any trace of common sense.
It was unavoidable that a fragile construction, growing taller and taller with weak foundations and visible structural faults, would fall apart. And so it did, in 2007, with the rubble crashing down on the real economy.
Years go by, but nobody seems to understand (or admit) that there can’t be any recovery without radical surgery, removing the roots of the disease.
Still to this day, when we hear or read the word “market”, there seems to be only one such thing. The stock exchange. As if that weird environment had anything to do with the world we live in.
Bubbles had inflated and deflated. Only a few of the accounting forgers had been tried and and found guilty. There was no learning of the basic problems. Still now, debates and arguments never end, the roller coaster never stops.
The media, the information industry, the dominating culture as a whole, seem to be desperately in love with a hideous parasite.
The obvious goddess in the quaint financemania cult is the praying mantis,
devouring her lovers as well as any other insects that happen to be on her way.Economy has always been a questionable “science”. But from uncertainty we have moved on to madness. How can anyone believe that the real value of anything can change, for no reason, in a few days? Or wobble up and down several times in the same session? The explanation is quite simple. It’s financial gambling, nothing else.
With atrocious delay, at last someone is beginning to ask where is the broken machinery. How can it be possible, for instance, that the so-called control authorities are private companies, actively involved in the trickery?
Such idiocy wouldn’t be tolerated in any casino. With a relevant difference: gamblers risk their own money. The finance cheaters profit by threatening to ruin nations, governments, organizations, companies, families and people worldwide if they don’t follow their bizarre whims.
In the overwhelming noise of looming catastrophe there are some comforting exceptions. Such as many companies, large and small, quietly continuing to do what they are supposed to and remaining quite healthy.
A small news item, on August 4, 2011, passed almost unnoticed. A criminal court in Trani, Italy, is pursuing for embezzlement executives in two of the largest rating agencies.
Trani, 54 thousand inhabitants, on Italy’s Adriatic coastIt would be fun if a worldwide revolution started in Trani. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely. But if a few others, here and there around the world, had the same idea, they could begin to shed some light on the plots and schemes of the vampires.
Where is the great opinion leader, or the simple bearer of good sense, who can show us the way out of this mess? So far, alas, nowhere in sight.
But maybe, rather than a philosopher, an economist, a politician or a banker, we should be looking for a psychiatrist.
Post scriptum
Pandemic depression
A few days after I had published these comments, I was pleasantly surprised by an unusually bright article in an Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, on August 20, 2011. The author, Guido Ceronetti, isn’t an economist or a political reporter. He is a writer, poet, philosopher, playwright. He lives and thinks in the world of human life, not the weird fantasy of financemania.
Occasional uneasiness, he says, has always existed. It was known in different ways, spleen, blues, melancholy, ennui, taedium vitae, etcetera, before it was called “depression” – and became pandemic, afflicting almost everyone and everywhere. This is how he explains it. «Against pervasive unwell-being, personal or social wellbeing doesn’t matter. Anti-anxiety remedies enrich a pharmaceutic industry that finds it convenient to alleviate the disease without treating it, to spread the expensive habit of drug addiction.»
And now it’s much worse. «This endless printed and broadcasted vomiting, economy-economy-economy, ruling classes not caring for anything else, this machine-gunning into people’s minds that there is an unprecedented crisis, such as there never was before, colossal, irremediable, out of control on a planetary scale, in which dustbin is all this nonsense going? Into people’s minds, with the purpose of tearing them to pieces.»
Hard words – and rightly so. But Ceronetti goes on to be even more explicit. «We are, by reading and listening, dropped deeper and deeper into a shaky bucket, a filthy latrine in which bad omens accumulate.»
Of course the solution isn’t to try to survive without information. «We read headlines, hear news, look into comments and explanations. Human minds need words for nourishment. For this vital nutrition, it is necessary that none of the words have anything to do with the flaming dragon called economy, while nobody has the courage to face it and kill it.»
«“Economy”, in current language, is invasive faeces, that would need a drastic purge. Let’s continue to absorb the filth in growing quantities from everything being spoken and we shall see how horribly the personal and collective unconscious can be warped.» We have already seen some alarming consequences. If the despair preaching continues, they can only get worse.
Guido Ceronetti also has some comments on the meaning of “market”. «Our relationship with the world of numbers is made of small figures. Even an economy minister, whose cutting and tailoring is measured in billions of dollars or euros, counts cents in his purse or pocket when he is spending money like an ordinary person.»
«The real market, for all real people, all over the world, is in the places where our feelings and touch are alive – the friendly vegetable and fruit store or the intriguing old books market. The spasmodic figures in the stock exchange are percentages of death. “Necroeconomy” as it was called by a German magazine, “Die Welt”. Wherever this stinking leviathan rises its hideous head, the Depression hits millions of defenseless victims.»
Guido Ceronetti’s alarm isn’t exaggerated. Apparently the grotesque disease hasn’t yet brought humanity to the edge of extinction, but it has already caused enormous damage, including the misery, unhappiness and despair of too many people, in too many places, abandoned to their cruel suffering while the world’s ruling powers are fussing uselessly about the “stinking leviathan” of financial gambling.
In addition to the direct damage, degeneration of real economy and civil society, there are the enormous effects of the “flaming dragon”, the obsessive repetition of doomsday predictions in the never ending tide of misinformation that doesn’t know, or pretends not to understand, how it’s causing the evil.
The real world isn’t a garden of happiness and wellbeing. But we would have a much better chance of understanding – and trying to solve – real problems if we weren’t distracted by the macabre dances in the treacherous fiction of financial trickery. It would be a good idea if a cultural pathologist could find the formula for a “drastic purge”. Or if a brave knight killed the dragon. But anyhow it would be a substantial step forward if the world of information could wake up – and help us to recover from the nightmare.
