Wall Street

Reading Time: 12 minutes

Wall Street – the history

According to Wikipedia, in 1711, the city of New York made “a market at the foot of Wall Street the city’s first official slave market for the sale and rental of enslaved Black people and Indians.”

That little factoid kind of sets the tone for the relationship between Wall Street (the financial center in Manhattan) and everyone else. If you’re a seller or a buyer on Wall Street, things look a lot different than they do if you are one of the people whose future is being sold, rented, or otherwise disposed of on Wall Street.

Over the years since 1711, a lot of things have changed. For example, New York is part of the United States of America now, an entity that didn’t exist when buyers and sellers were first briskly exchanging human beings for money. The Wealth of Nations, more or less the Bible of capitalism, didn’t exist when buyers and sellers were first briskly exchanging human beings for money in the not so fair city of New York. But however much has changed, perhaps the essential character, the DNA of a street originally designed to keep the insiders in and the outsiders out, has not changed.

Over the years, Wall Street has financed everything it could get its fingers on to finance: slavery, railroads, tobacco, electricity, natural gas, lead, coal and iron – all the good stuff.

The stock market, as the New York Stock Exchange is widely known, as gone up over the years, seemingly creating vast wealth. It has also gone down, seemingly wiping out vast wealth.

It’s incredibly popular with the people it’s popular with (the people who buy and sell the futures of other people) and not nearly as popular with the people whose futures get bought and sold.

And who can forget its famous adventures in free market free-for-alls, such as the crash of 1929, the one that set off the Great Depression? A lot of people could forget apparently, since the financial center managed to do almost the same thing in 2008, setting off the Great Recession. In which, much like that initial slave market, the consequences were far worse for the people who didn’t make their living on Wall Street than it was for the people who did.

So why? Why did the city of New York set up a market for the sale and rental of enslaved human beings? Why does the United States and every other country in the world that can do so, have a stock market? What’s going on that people’s futures are bought and sold every day by other people who care nothing at all for the lives of the people they are affecting?

These are all good questions, given that humanity has spent most of its time on this planet without Wall Street, and that it doesn’t have to exist. There are other ways to organize markets — and slavery, in its various forms, isn’t necessary for the survival of humanity.

Good questions – but I don’t have the answer to them. All I can talk about are the years I know about – the years since Ronald Reagan was elected president and how the forces set in motion during those years are affecting you now. Let’s get started.

So once upon a time, Ronald Reagan had never been president of the USA. Inflation was high, the stock market not so much, Nixon was no longer in office after resigning in disgrace, Iran was pissed at the US, energy prices were up, and everyone was in a gloomy mood. Maybe not everyone, but the 70s were kind of a gloomy decade what with the Beatles breaking up and the Vietnam War, and civil unrest, and stagflation, and wage and price controls and extremely depressing presidents, too many drugs and not enough fun, and there was probably some bad weather in there too.

So Ronald Reagan came along toting the opinion that Milton Friedman had the right idea, which was that if government got out of the way and just let ‘free’ markets rip then the unbridled lust for profit would magically solve all the problems that government had thus far failed to solve.

Haha haha hahaha. That’s so cute. That’s not what happened.

Nothing in the universe magically solves all problems.

The human brain would looooooove it if there was something (like democracy or Communism or free markets or Christianity or science or technology or psychedelics or anything, anything at all) that would solve all problems.

The human brain is so devoted to the idea that everything would be so much easier for it if there was some magic cure for everything that it frequently tells people that there is indeed such a magic cure and it has found it. The human brain is a big fat liar.

But that doesn’t stop people from very sincerely believing the lies their brains tell them. The initial Reaganites believed. They were idealistic. They thought people needed to stop being pessimistic and looking at details and pointing out problems and instead they needed to be irresponsible and greedy and cheery and just believe, close their eyes and just really believe, in the magic of capitalism.

So people believed. They wanted to. They were fed up with not believing in anything. So they closed their eyes and believed.

Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile. That’s more or less what Wall Street did when Reagan started letting the buyers and sellers of other people’s futures inch closer to their goal of owning everything and everyone. A mile, or, in the case of Wall Street, kilos of blow. Snort enough cocaine and anything will seem magic.

Yeah, Wall Street started loping enthusiastically toward unlimited profit and unlimited pain for the ones being profited off of until…1987.

In 1987, the stock market dropped like a hot rock, and a recession followed and everyone came to their senses and realized that capitalism and business are not magic after all; they are just human inventions that attempt to solve problems that consistently develop no matter what you do.

Hahahahaha. ROFL. Just kidding. Of course the number of people who came to their senses hovered somewhere in the vicinity of zero.

But at least a lot of people on Wall Street lost their jobs! I’m sure that was fun for all concerned. The free market operating as intended.

Perhaps since the recession was relatively short-lived, people just kept right on believing. They doubled down on believing. What are you gonna do? Capitalism produces recessions. Capitalism is magic. Capitalism will save the world. Communism on the other hand will destroy the world and so will AIDS. So pay no mind to the periodic recessions!

What a bouncy happy philosophy that was. And it kept on being bouncy and happy until George Bush (senior not W) got elected. George Bush wasn’t Reagan and he didn’t seem very revolutionary, like Reagan did. He seemed, in fact, downright unrevolutionary. And that set an increasingly rabid pack of true believer conservatives into a fury.

George Bush wasn’t radical enough. He didn’t care enough about money. How can you be president of the United States if you don’t care about MONEY all the time 24/7, nothing else, don’t you understand life is all about MONEY!

Or something like that. Right on cue, the economy coughed up another recession (gotta love those recessions!) and George Bush found himself out of a job that, unfortunately for him, was not all about money. The people on streets other than the one named after a Wall weren’t happy because they were having a hard time making a living, and the die-hard free market believers weren’t happy because…well nothing makes a die-hard true believer happy.

Whatever it is that a die-hard true believer believes is not true.

So a die-hard true believer is always fighting reality, which is exhausting and not conducive to contentment or happiness.

So buh-bye George.

Luckily for Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton, the world changed under Clinton’s watch. So whoever it is that needs to be extremely enthusiastic about something in public policy decided that now would be the time to be extremely enthusiastic about global trade and globalism in general. Global trade seemed, at the time, to be an incredibly optimistic concept designed to fuel growth and expansion and wealth and make the whole world better off.

Which it did. At least at first.

Partly because even though the rabid conservatives were still quite rabid (and just plain strange – looking at you, Newt Gingrinch), the world at large was getting knocked on its ass by something called the internet and later, the world wide web. Wowza!

So people, as they are encouraged to do under capitalism, went galloping off in the latest directions so that they could more or less promptly experience what was known at the time as the ‘dot.com crash’.

Did this make people less enamored of the internet and technology?

Ho ho ho ho ho, of course not. Have you learned nothing from our prior examples?

Of course you have.

You already know that the internet and technology wormed their way into every teeny tiny orifice of our lives and we can’t get them out now.

By the time Republicans were prudishly worrying about Bill Clinton’s blow jobs (at least he got some ya know, wink, wink – or is that just locker room talk?), the Wall Streets of the world were deciding that the internet and technology were magic and this time they absolutely positively were going to solve all the world’s problems, no kidding this time, magic, absolute magic.

If you don’t believe me, read some of the things people who thought they were smart actually wrote about Google and Friendster and the internet and Netscape and god knows what. Everything was going to be so great with the internet and technology because it was going to do exactly the same thing capitalism was going to do earlier – fundamentally change human nature and make all the bad parts go away!

It was good times. Nothing like the 70s with all its bad weather and civil unrest. At least the US had a president good looking enough to get a blow job instead of dreary old Nixon with his incredibly prim little scandals with all those people in dark suits swearing like motherfuckers.

And then George W. Bush got elected and all the good times immediately went away. You want magic – George W. Bush almost magically made everything happy disappear in an instant.

9/11, Anthrax, beheadings, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the rise of China, Patriot acts and wireless surveillance, terrorism and terror, torture and scandals, non-fucking-stop bad news of every persuasion along with a government and a populace that seemingly had completely lost its fucking mind in the face of adversity.

Even if Bush wanted to get something halfway decent done, like let’s say immigration reform, the extremist wing of his own party wouldn’t let him.

So that worked out real well.

And George W. (the ‘W’ stands for ‘well, will you look at that? He managed to screw absolutely everything up’) Bush left in a blaze of complete economic meltdown in 2008.

Yup, in early 2008, the last year of Bush’s presidency, an innately boring man by the name of Ben Bernanke was working nights and weekends to be the grownup in the room and do absolutely extraordinary (non-free-market) things to save the US (and world) economy from absolute fucking ruin.

Because the free market isn’t magic.

It doesn’t get rid of all the bad parts of human nature. It doesn’t make people smart. It doesn’t make them rational. It doesn’t solve all the problems that governments haven’t been able to solve. Instead…

it creates new and horrific and gigantic problems that governments haven’t been able to solve – like massive pollution, apocalyptic climate change, housing crises of immense scale, inequality that leads almost inevitably to despotism, brutality and war, and…. well you get the picture.

Bye bye magic.

Just kidding. There will always be something that people want to believe is magic and will solve everything – even if that something is as simple and easy to implement as constantly lying to yourself and everyone else.

By 2011, at least some people were trying to ‘Occupy Wall Street’ and blame the financiers for all the problems. The financiers of course weren’t having it and neither were the free market extremists.

The belief in magic won’t go away. But it is time to say bye bye to the capitalism extremists, the ones who think and business and privatization will solve all the problems that business and privatization have caused.

Wall Street – Part 2 – the future?

What capitalism and business in a free market system do have going for them is that they are dynamic. They move. They change. They keep people from getting bored. They keep people from feeling like things are stagnating. Something’s always happening. Something is going up; something is going down.

This is a big advantage. It’s one of the major advantages it has over socialism and communism. Socialism and communism (to the extent they have ever been implemented) can seem utterly motionless. They’re not of course, but they can seem that way.

The human brain, that organ that wants to pretend that all problems can be magically solved, actually needs problems to function. It doesn’t do well when things seem motionless. It stops being able to perceive, it gets disoriented and gloomy, hopeless, and incapable of making of decisions, even bad ones. A motionless economic system is not good for the brain unless the brain has something else to think about.

That something else to think about is what made medieval feudalism so successful for so long. Feudalism is utterly motionless. There’s no movement at all. If you’re a serf, you’re a serf. If you’re aristocracy, you’re aristocracy. If you’re royalty, you’re royalty. No way to get out of it. You’re stuck. No point worrying about it or having ambition to be something else cuz it ain’t gonna happen.

But since you’re not worrying about your place in the economic system, you’ve got plenty of time to worry about other things – like sex, and God, and feasting, and farming, and jousting. You may not be in motion, but not moving means you are secure.

So even though capitalism’s dynamic movement is attractive, it’s not necessary. There are other ways to do things. And even within a capitalistic system, it’s possible to emphasize some elements more than others.

What’s happened as the stock market and technology have evolved is that being a buyer or a seller in the stock market has become sort of a chess game. It’s all about strategy. It’s a game. It’s divorced from the reality of what those little ticker symbols represent – and what those dollar amounts mean to the individuals whose futures are being bought and sold.

Oliver Stone made a movie released in 1987 as a commentary on the new attitudes that Reagan brought to the fore; that movie was called ‘Wall Street.’ In it, a corporate raider named Gordon Gekko shows an ambitious young broker what kind of a game it is really is – and how divorced from everyone else’s reality it really is.

Gekko, who made famous the phrase “Greed is good,” also shows the young broker (played by Charlie Sheen) that the stock market is really a black market. The game is rigged. The only way to win it is by cheating. Regular suckers get chewed up and spit out at some point; they don’t have any more of a chance than those enslaved persons did in 1711.

In the economy of today, companies get on the hamster wheel of public financing (i.e., going public and getting money from stock market) and then start furiously churning out the marketing and the branding and the never-ending struggle to get customers and stay afloat. The honest ones aren’t trying to win the game. They’re just trying not to get kicked out. Their dream to was to become an ‘insider’ on the inside of Wall Street – once there, they just don’t want to become outsiders again.

But not everyone is honest.

Capitalism doesn’t make people honest.

It doesn’t change human nature. It exploits human nature. For the outsized benefit of the greedy, the cheaters, the liars, and the thieves.

That’s why the SEC and the various (and labyrinthine) rules regulating the stock market exist. Because greed isn’t good. Greed is just a component of life on earth that periodically leads to excess, a crash, and then constriction. Greed is entertaining, and time-consuming for those who are slaves to its commands, but it’s not good.

So the SEC and the various financial regulatory agencies are supposed to keep all that enthusiastic greedy desire to cheat, lie, steal, and otherwise deceive in check. Regulation is supposed to save the stock market from its own inherent weakness and tendency to amplify the bad parts of human nature not negate them.

At one point Gordon Gekko tells the Charlie Sheen character that capitalism is a zero sum game. If someone’s a winner, then someone else is a loser. It’s chess. Someone wins; someone else loses.

That’s not how capitalism is supposed to work. It’s supposed to ensure that everyone loses but the collective wins. No one is supposed to reap excess profits, but everyone ends up with more because all the strategizing led people to produce more and make the economy as a whole wealthier.

In other words, the Gordon Gekkos, and the Bernard Arnaults, and Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk are all signs that capitalism is NOT working as it’s supposed to. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk represent failures of the stock market and the current system to police itself. Which is not surprising if you follow the news about Musk and Amazon and note that both seem quite determined to bring back the practice of renting enslaved people.

It is of course, possible to make money, to earn money if you will, without being greedy. Even small changes in the regulatory framework that surrounds Wall Street and capitalism today could have large impacts in reducing the failures that see people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk drowning in excess while most full-time workers in the US cannot afford to buy housing.

A greater respect for workers

(one might even say a minimal respect for workers) and jobs could tip the balance toward successful capitalism that is not hurtling everyone towards despotism.

It’s not that rich people are going to go away. That’s never going to happen. A society needs rich people who live in rich people houses and have rich people things just like it needs art and green spaces. Rich people are attractive, interesting, seductive. Like capitalism, they give people the feeling that they are not stuck in motionless monotony. There is something out there to aspire to, dream of, escape in imagination to.

But rich people have existed for a long long time without the kind of obscene wealth that makes a word like ‘super-yacht’ refer to something that exists in the real world. There don’t need to be any super-yachts anywhere ever. Simple yachts will do.

So when you hear someone whining and crying about too much regulation of Wall Street or business or of the ‘free market,’ you know what to do.

GET PRETTY FED UP.

Tags: air pollution, google, government