Markets are like casinos

Stock and commodity markets were originally created to allow investors to put money into enterprises, financing companies that would otherwise have a tough time raising the money they needed to operate. These days the markets are little more than high stakes casinos with "investors" winning or losing by correctly guessing prices rather than through any interest in the particular enterprise.

Our governments play along with this game by treating all industrial problems as financial. The notion of having an industrial strategy, the force behind the rise of Asian powerhouses, has been forgotten.

Nero is said to have played the fiddle while Rome burned. Two millennia later, we play the markets.

Gary Dale