From King William III’s empty coffers in the eighteenth century to David Cameron’s ‘big, open and comprehensive offer’ in the twenty-first, penniless governments have had to go cap in hand to the markets. Stock exchanges have always been on hand to help out, though not at any price, and states have assisted by settling matters of morality and legality in the expanding domain of finance. This episode unpicks the complex relationship between markets and state and wonders whether there’s anything positive for our building project.

Transcription

I first noticed it in May 2010, on the sixth, to be exact.

If you are listening in the UK you might remember 6 May as the day of a general election, the day when Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown was voted out of power. It was not a decisive defeat for Brown, nor a victory for anyone else. David Cameron, as leader of the Conservative party, looked set to form a minority government. Stock markets seesawed with anxiety, posting big losses on the morning after the election. Markets like certainty, the pundits said, so Cameron did something else.

Yes, he made Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrat party a ‘big, open and comprehensive offer’ to share in a coalition government. The rest, as they say, is history and a very distressing one at that. Such moments matter. John Rentoul, writing in the Independent, wonders how things might have gone differently; he sketches out an alternative story where Clegg joins forces with a Labour Party revived by new leadership. ‘If Clegg had made a different choice,’ he writes, ‘we would be living in a different country now: slightly better off, with better public services, and probably still in the EU.[1] I think that’s true. But could Clegg have done so? I’m not sure. My recollection of those moments is the extraordinary prominence given to the sentiments of the financial markets. It seemed that the force driving politicians to set up this bizarre, ideologically incompatible coalition – one that would ultimately destroy the Liberal Democrats as a third party in British politics – was not a concern to properly serve the British electorate and represent its wishes but an overwhelming need to pacify the markets. This was how it was reported during the tense days that followed the election. In the Telegraph, 9 May: ‘The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats last night sought to reassure financial markets that they are close to agreeing an economic deal that would allow David Cameron to take power.’ On 10 May the Financial Times reported that “both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat leaders want to strike a deal as soon as possible to reassure both the public and the financial markets that a stable government can be formed quickly.” It seemed undignified, these leaders scurrying to shake hands to keep the market  happy. Don’t forget, this was not yet two years since the British government had been forced to throw half a billion pounds sterling at the banks to stop them collapsing and taking the infrastructure of global civilisation with them. One might have been forgiven for thinking that financial markets did not know anything about anything, let alone the crucial matters of government…

Hello, and welcome to How to Build a Stock Exchange. My name is Philip Roscoe, and I teach and research at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. I am a sociologist interested in the world of finance and I want to build a stock exchange. Why? Because, when it comes to finance, what we have just isn’t good enough. To build something – to make something better – you need to understand how it works. Sometimes that means taking it to pieces, and that’s exactly what we’ll be doing in this podcast. I’ll be asking: what makes financial markets work? What is in a price, and why does it matter? How did finance become so important? And who invented unicorns? In the last episode,