Tosser's Independent Trading

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Today's post kind of follows on from yesterday's. We watched The Big Short yesterday afternoon; a 2015 film based on the book of the same name by Michael Lewis about the corruption and fraud that lay at the very heart of the 2008 financial crash. I won't wreck the film - or the book - for those who've not seen either: but suffice it to say that the nub of the tale is rooted in the underlying systemic lie of free-market Capitalism: that markets are free and self-regulating, and governed, if at all, by the prudence and propriety of its actors. Not so, as I've said repeatedly before, ad nauseam.

Fair trading has always been generally seen as being one jump ahead of your competitor, either by dint of price and/or quality of your commodity, or by seeing advantageous changes in the market before they [your competition] do and acting accordingly to get the jump on them.  Communications has always been key to to trading on the financial markets [blog posts passim] with its apogee (read nadir) being High Frequency Trading. Pulling the wool over the eyes of the opposition is what it all amounts to in the end. In normal walks of life, fraud is treated as fraud, and punished as such; but 'economies of scale' and the 'respectability' of those in charge of what after all is our money and the economy - of which we're an active and integral part - hold sway over morality and the rule of law.

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