Politics and Market Realities (MacroBusiness.au.com)

The following are excerpts from a piece on financial regulation and the anticipation for the development of a different political state, particularly in Europe.  Some very interesting and compelling perspectives.


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As I have argued before, it is impossible to deregulate financial markets because money is rules about value and obligation. So what happened instead when financial markets were “deregulated” is that the governments’ role as the setter of rules was handed over to traders, who made up their own rules: more than $700 trillion of derivatives, intense high frequency trading and so on. It results in a weird contradiction: governments trying to save their systems from the new rules being created by the traders, yet the traders relying on the state’s rules about finance to overlay their games of meta money. Meta money traders have to have conventional share trades between buyers and sellers to apply algorithms to manipulate the markets at high speed. You need conventional commerce in commodities to use derivatives to play commodity futures, for example. It is why governments are constantly attacked by players in the financial markets who are simultaneously hard at work exploiting those “errors” to make money. Meta hypocrisy to accompany the meta money, I suppose.

The tsunami of this meta money, which is borderless, stateless and has no thought for its effect on governments or polities, still relies for its very existence on the rules set up by governments. And as has been obvious since the GFC, governments and tax payers are expected to clean up the mess when it inevitably all goes wrong. That can be done once. When it goes wrong a second time, the firepower will not be there, as is increasingly evident in Europe. The conventional rules will have been weakened too much by the rules invented by the traders of meta money.

It represents a comprehensive failure of government, and will not lead to the creation of a new type of state. It is rather a new type of chaos. It is especially pernicious when governments start to dabble in the meta money, as Greece did when the government covered up its debt by using derivatives. That is wholly unforgiveable. It is bad enough that governments have allowed traders to make up their own rules with money, in effect playing Russian roulette with money itself. But when they, too, start using the same tricks, then the road back to sanity becomes long indeed.

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