Mastering Markets

Media commentators, and the tame Economists who provide them with sound-bites, continue to talk of 'the markets' as independent entities that have the power to undermine national economies and even multinational agencies in their endeavours to stabilise the prices of currencies [against each other] and national debt [quoted in an external currency: e.g. US bonds priced in the Yen or the Euro]. A market is merely a social structure. The dealers in markets are companies that are registered [and taxed] under the laws of specific countries, so the implicit assumption that they somehow exist as agents over which states have no control is a silly outcome from economic theory. Market participants are susceptible to government control at work, no less than they are subject to regulation when they drive home in their cars. If governments opt not to control the behaviour of marketeers, or use arcane and ineffectual methodologies that are concordant with Economists' theorising, any resulting detriment is their responsibility.

Back in the simple world that existed before the Big Bang of 1986, banks [which were then recognisable as a specific group of trading businesses] were subject to the corset. Just as a material corset pinches in the waistline of a person who is embarrassed by obesity, so the banking corset limited the extent to which each bank could expand its business. Banks were told the limits, and they obeyed: sort of, for a time. But then the Bank of England, as the regulator, allowed the rule to be 'bent': the Bank turned a blind eye to window dressing. The banks were required to demonstrate that they were keeping to the rules on one date each month; which allowed them to manage the timing of loans and repayments so that they went significantly about the permitted level for most of the month. It was by making and all-but-breaking such rules as the corset that old-style regulation became discredited. But if the rules and the methodologies had been imposed effectively they need never have become discredited. The supposedly gentlemanly banks of the pre-big-bang era slid around the rules: and their successors have continued to do so.

The present situation in both global finance and in domestic stock markets requires control. History shows that market players ignore rules that are not enforced, and try to manipulate rules and principles that are enforced; so we should be prepared now to treat market participants with firmness - and no exceptions - if rules or precepts are broken.Then new, simple rules can be made and new precepts for the conduct of market operatives can b established.

Within share markets, rules should specify that only registered owners of shares could ever vote on those shares: and company secretaries [or equivalents] should be required to certify compliance [with draconian penalties for breaches].  A corset can be applied to movements in the valuation of shares, such that sales and all other types of transfers of shares are frozen after the price has moved up or down by more than 1% in a day, or 2% in any three-day period. The period of the freeze would then be announced by the regulator, and would not be less than the time necessary for the buyers to pay for the last shares sold and register their new ownership. Exactly similar rules could apply to sales of state bonds and other financial instruments. Derivatives, swaps and other gambling slips that are created and traded as 'hedging' instruments should be subject to gambling tax of at least 10%, and subjected to gambling laws and the regulation of the Gambling Commission. The Commission could establish its own corset on the creation of each class of betting instrument.

Market participants and their conduct can be controlled - and should be controlled. The control need not be complex: just the opposite. The best control would be simple control, and breaches of both the rules and the principles must be punished by both financial levies and penal servitude.