Having the milk of human kindness racing through my veins I would go with "dumb as a sack of hammers." Here we see the various incarnations of the financial press: WSJ, FT, Barrons, et.al., as work-theraphy provided by the members of the ruling elites for people who would otherwise be wandering the streets, getting run over by buses, falling down open manholes, & etc. etc. etc.
Otherwise, the complete failure of Mr Wolf to include the gah-whomping increase in M3 on the part of the Central Bankers over the past 12 years in the 'First World' in his little essay as the fuel for the "recent explosive growth in finance." Since Mr. Wolf is mentally incompetent there is no reason to refer - yet again - to the Federal Reserve Bank of the US which, for several years, effectively gave money to Money Center Banks.
A cynic might suggest it is somewhat easy for a financier to make a profit when someone else is paying you to haul money away so you can lend it. And with some of that money purchase themselves a writer on matters financial or twelve. To support this cynicism he (or she) could point to the Economist . In that August journal, when the US Federal Reserve quit publishing the M3 statistic, their reported estimate of the growth of the money supply went 8.8%/year to 5.3% in a mere 3 weeks. A dramatic reduction attributed to -- well ... nothing. It just happened.
(Lo! A Miracle!)
But I, with the Milk of Human Kindness running through my veins, would never consider such a thesis. A doo run-run-run, a doo run-run
We still need to refine our discourse so that it can be understood, let alone absorbed... In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
There is a story to be told about the structural growth of the equity markets, with the expansion of pension funds after WW2, followed by the wave of deregulation and then the sea-change of policy (didn't you write a diary about "Bubbles" Greenspan at some point...)
But these are natural questions to at least ask if you look at things from a "systems perspective" it seems to me... aren't they?
The other point is that they see the PS as being unreformed, marxist and hopelessly out of touch. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
I could understand this for people that were over 20 years old in 1981, when the PS nationalised, but as a young'un, it took me quite some time to understand that then the PS was actually strongly on the left at the time, not the party of "a little bit of redistribution to the poor, please" in the middle of the neo liberal market that I knew for most of my life. Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
