"When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain."
- Napoleon Bonaparte.
Long before entertainment came in the form of bits and bytes, Marx Toys made a game in which combatants controlled two plastic robots in a boxing ring. The game was won when one player landed a knockout blow on his rival, causing his head to pop up. I seem to recall this game being called „Battling Bonkers?, but according to Wikipedia it was branded „Raving Bonkers? in the UK. Our American cousins, with their preference for vivid rhymes, call them „Rock?em Sock?em Robots?. I am reliably informed by colleagues that the game plays a cameo role in „Toy Story 2?.
Those concerned at the inexorable spread of robotics through our culture will probably view recent stock market “developments” with some alarm. Michael Hudson, a professor at the University of Missouri, suggests that the average holding period for a US stock is now 22 seconds. The average foreign currency “investment” is glacial by comparison, lasting a full 30 seconds. The protagonists this time round are also robots, engaging in what is known as High Frequency Trading (HFT), namely the deployment of computer programmes using algorithmic models that now account for three quarters of equity transactions in US markets.
If the intellectual and capital investment expended on HFT were spent instead on something like medical research, the world might be a healthier place. And the market might be fundamentally healthier, too. As it is, as Keynes himself suggested,
“Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”
Readers may recall the “Flash Crash” of 6 May 2010, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped by over 1000 points, not its largest percentage loss but certainly its largest points loss in history. During the same trading session it then recovered most of those losses. (Related but less technologically turbo-charged programme trading is held by many to be responsible for…
