Comments by "" (@charliemoore2551) on "Do the people who work in the City of London add value?" video.

  1. "Manage other people's money or speculate with it". The problem with that is that it's the same people doing both. I knew someone who worked for a well known and highly respected but now-defunct firm of brokers. There were all sorts of highly illegal but difficult-to-detect scams worked. One was where different clients' money was used for a basket of speculations. At the outcome, the favoured clients would have the most successful speculations to their accounts and the others, usually smaller clients, would have the less successful ones. To say that the City is "John from Nigeria" multiplied by 678,000 would be an exaggeration - but only a small one. The irony is that, if these people had the same financialist and asset-stripping principles applied to their work that they force on others, they would all but disappear. Nearly everything they do can be done by technology. The system of monthly accounts they use in the Stock Exchange, for example, was only necessary when all transactions had to be written up by hand in ledgers. It facilitates the practice of shorting - selling shares you do not own in the expectation that you will be able to buy them at a lower figure at the end of the account. Modern technology would allow the whole thing to be done in real-time now but that would rob some very powerful people of a nice little earner.
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