| |
Advertisement for Broadway play 1895.
The personification of markets, universal in the media, is an essential part of the justification of a capitalist economy free from the constraints of democratic oversight. This personification is general across all types of markets, as if the market itself were an independent actor in society. In recent years it has become integral to the justification of a socially dysfunctional financial system, national and global. It is manifested in such statements as the "the European Union is struggling to convince financial markets it has got what it takes to save the currency". [http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64R22S20100528?type=ousivMolt]
This personification is an abstraction from the real world of speculators and financial fraud, universal in the media, and is an essential part of the mystification of financial behaviour. It facilitates the mythology that the dysfunctional financial system is not the work of men and women (mostly the former) within institutions with socially irrational rules and norms, but rather a manifestation of the inexorable operation of the laws of nature that no government can change. It is not "markets" that "wanted" countries to commit themselves to fiscal cuts, but a specific collection of financial speculators that sought to coerce governments to take actions in the immediate economic interests of those speculators.
The turmoil in currency and bonds markets in Europe and elsewhere provides opportunity for massive profits for financial speculators. Frequently this turmoil is the result of actions of a few people with access to extremely large amounts of money, whose role is obscured by the personification of markets as independent actors, and whose destructive role in society is disguised by the media describing them as "investors".
In the absence of appropriate controls and regulations, speculators with access to large financial resources act through markets to undermine the actions of governments. Too frequently governments (e.g., Merkel's) aid and abet that speculative behaviour by pretending it occurs through an impersonal market process over which little control can be exercised. Financial markets are not in themselves the problem. The problem is that the rules and constraints on those market are so weak or inappropriate that speculators can behave recklessly with confidence of never being held accountable.
|
