Hypnotising politicians, who throw money at the banks, no strings attached. No matter what damage is done. Trashing the planet. Forcing cuts to things that make life better. The bankers that we bailed out then gave themselves bonuses that were bigger than the first wave of public spending cuts.
These people want volatility in the market because that's how they make their money. They want to encourage it and they do encourage it by trading and speculating in the way that they do.
We haven't borrowed all this money from an army of pensioners who've been saving up their whole lives.
Money in the current system is debt. It's created when banks make loans.
Who knows what the term "hedging" is? Spreading your risk. Managing your risk, insuring against it, precisely. Up until very recently, until the 1960s, the Securities and Exchange Commission would be quite clear that derivatives that weren't based on real products like agricultural products, so pork belly futures or whatever, would in fact be essentially a kind of gambling and you weren't allowed to trade them.
They are used to their own way of handling money and they try and implement their own idea of how their small household economy works into the national economy.
And of course it just doesn't work out at all.
By 2008 the outstanding loan portfolio of bank-created credit, also known as commercial bank money, stood at over 2 trillion.
As recently as 1982 the ratio of notes and coins to bank deposits was 1:12.
If that belief changes, it can change very rapidly in a financial market, he process of financial contagion can take place in just minutes or seconds even. You can just move from being an apparently quite a stable robust economy, to being one that suddenly sentiment has turned against you, and you find that the markets are picking on you.
It's not going to be driven by panics, manias, speculative bubbles. None of this is going to happen. If there is movement up and down it's because something real is happening, and traders and investors in financial markets are responding to it.