How to Build a Stock Exchange

Modern stock exchanges couldn’t exist without wires. They are virtual, global, infinitely expanding. Their trading floors are humming servers. But no one ever planned this transformation, and it took many by surprise. This episode explores the long processes of automation throughout the second half of the twentieth century. We hear about engineers, screens, and how technology created a new stock exchange almost by accident.

Transcription

Let’s take a walk through a stock exchange. In the 1980s, it would have sounded like this…

—– trading pit —–[1]

That’s a trading pit, with the bell sounding, bodies crammed together, pushing, shouting. We have heard it a few times by now. In the late 1980s, when Tom Wolfe visited the trading room of Pierce & Pierce, he still found a terrible noise, ‘an ungodly roar, like the roar of a mob…an oppressive space with a ferocious glare, writhing silhouettes…moving about in an agitated manner and sweating early in the morning and shouting, which created the roar. It was’, he writes, ‘the sound of well-educated young white men baying for money on the bond market.’ But the market is only partly in this trading room, it is outside, absent, on the screens. And if you walk through a stock exchange today, it would sound like this…

——– ‘singing servers’—–[2]

Isn’t that eerie? The sound of servers in a data centre, chattering to one another. A beautiful recording, too. These changing sounds are the background to the story in today’s episode, that of automation, the transformation from spoken markets to those of near instantaneous speed, a transformation that has made possible an increase in the volume and scale of financial transactions to a level that would have been simply inconceivable 30 years ago. Economists delight in pointing out how technological improvements in financial markets lead to socially beneficial outcomes through facilitating liquidity and choice. That argument, however, supposes that changing the medium of trade has no consequences other than making it easier. By now, we know this cannot be the case: throughout the first part of this podcast we have seen how the shape, function and purpose of financial markets are every bit as dependent upon their material structures as on regulatory regimes and global political-economic conditions. Through the 1980s and 1990s, automation turned stock exchanges inside out. That is today’s story – even if we don’t make it all the way into the cloud in one episode.

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?

The last two episodes have focused on the upheavals felt in the world of finance during the 1980s, the decade when greed became good. We saw, in episode six, how shifts in the tectonic plates of global economic governance and the intellectual fashions around ownership and collective versus individual responsibility had led to the birth of a new kind of social contract, the individualism of Thatcherism and Reaganomics. We saw how – in the UK at least – that manifested itself in a new kind of investor, Sid, the archetypal blue-collar worker turned property owner who bought into the newly privatised industries and could consider himself a member of the rentier classes.

1980s Wall Street was as inventive as it was ostentatious. New kinds of deal turned the relationship between finance and society on its head: collateralized mortgage obligations made homeowners into raw material for profit, while the leveraged buyout allowed corporate raiders to tear up companies in the name of shareholder value, all this backed by the new science of financial economics. This episode takes a random walk around some of finance’s most rapacious innovations.

Transcript

The investment-banking firm of Pierce & Pierce occupied the fiftieth, fifty-first, fifty-second, fifty-third, and fifty-fourth floors of a glass tower that rose up sixty stories from out of the gloomy groin of Wall Street. The bond trading room, where Sherman worked, was on the fiftieth. Every day he stepped out of an aluminum-walled elevator into what looked like the reception area of one of those new London hotels catering to the Yanks. Near the elevator door was a fake fireplace and an antique mahogany mantelpiece with great bunches of fruit carved on each corner. Out in front of the fake fireplace was a brass fence or fender, as they called it in country homes in the west of England. In the appropriate months a fake fire glowed within, casting flickering lights upon a prodigious pair of brass andirons. The wall surrounding it was covered in more mahogany, rich and reddish, done in linen-fold panels carved so deep, you could feel the expense in the tips of your fingers by just looking at them. All of this reflected the passion of Pierce & Pierce’s chief executive officer, Eugene Lopwitz, for things British. Things British, library ladders, bow-front consoles, Sheraton legs, Chippendale backs, cigar cutters, tufted club chairs, Wilton-weave carpet were multiplying on the fiftieth floor at Pierce & Pierce day by day. Alas, there wasn’t much Eugene Lopwitz could do about the ceiling, which was barely eight feet above the floor. The floor had been raised one foot. Beneath it ran enough cables and wires to electrify Guatemala. The wires provided the power for the computer terminals and telephones of the bond trading room. The ceiling had been lowered one foot, to make room for light housings and air-conditioning ducts and a few more miles of wire. The floor had risen; the ceiling had descended; it was as if you were in an English mansion that had been squashed.

This is Tom Wolfe, of course, from his remarkable Bonfire of the Vanities, as we first encounter the workplace of the protagonist – I won’t say hero, for he’s certainly not that – master of the universe, possessor of a Yale chin – Sherman McCoy. It turns out that this kitsch Englishness is just the drapery on something much more primal. Wolfe continues…

No sooner did you pass the fake fireplace than you heard an ungodly roar, like the roar of a mob. It came from somewhere around the corner. You couldn’t miss it. Sherman McCoy headed straight for it, with relish.

On this particular morning, as on every morning, it resonated with his very gizzard. He turned the corner, and there it was: the bond trading room of Pierce & Pierce. It was a vast space, perhaps sixty by eighty feet, but with the same eight-foot ceiling bearing down on your head. It was an oppressive space with a ferocious glare, writhing silhouettes, and the roar. The glare came from a wall of plate glass that faced south, looking out over New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty, Staten Island, and the Brooklyn and New Jersey shores. The writhing silhouettes were the arms and torsos of young men, few of them older than forty. They had their suit jackets off. They were moving about in an agitated manner and sweating early in the morning and shouting, which created the roar. It was the sound of well-educated young white men baying for money on the bond market.

The sound of well-educated young white men baying for money.

Wolfe, already a famous long-form journalist,

We can’t make sense of contemporary stock exchanges without understanding the huge changes that swept through finance in the 1980s. This episode explores those upheavals at the level of states and markets, and the of lived reality of Britain’s markets: the collapse of Bretton Woods, the Iron Lady’s reforms, striking miners and a new kind of investor called Sid. This really was the decade when greed became good.

Transcript

Under the great dome of the Old House, close to the edge of the floor: here you would have found the post-war boom in the shares of dog-tracks, and here you would have found a remarkably tall man, one Sidney Jenkins, sometimes known as ‘King of the Dogs’, reputable dealer in all shares leisure-related. On 1 April, 1960 – April’s Fools day – Sidney Jenkins and his son Anthony formed S Jenkins & Son Ltd. Sidney’s son John started work as junior in the early 1960s.  It was, says Anthony, ‘a family firm and everybody knew one another.  We knew when people had families and passed their driving tests, and they were good days.’

The firm specialized in leisure stocks, dog tracks and the holiday camps – Butlins and Pontins – that boomed in the days before cheap air travel opened up the Costas. This was often described as the ‘spivvy’ end of the market, but it lacked the defining characteristic of spivviness – financial sharp practice. Sidney Jenkins may have been ‘King of the Dogs’ but his firm was conservatively run. It had a good reputation and deep personal connections to the directors of the businesses whose stocks they traded. Jenkins had a horror of overtrading and the ‘hammerings’, when gavels wielded by the Exchange’s top hatted waiters sounded the end of a firm and the confiscation of a partner’s assets. Jenkins eschewed excessive risk wherever possible. The firm never borrowed money or stock: ‘Father’s attitude was “I like to sleep at night,”’ says Anthony. ‘We earned a good living out of the business and the staff all did well, and Father’s attitude was “Why should I over-trade?” That was something that he was always frightened of.  You’ve got to remember also father saw a lot of hammerings, a lot firms went broke in his time.’

People remember the Jenkins family for two things: for being tall, and for being decent. One former broker’s boy remembers going down to the floor on his first day unaccompanied – an unusual occurrence – and looking helplessly at the crowd: ‘I was sort of wandering around, a little bit lost, and a very tall man bent down and said, ‘Your first day, sonny?’ and I said, ‘Yes sir’. He said, ‘How can I help?’ and I told him, and I showed him the list of prices I’d been obliged to collect. That man was Sid Jenkins.’

The family were generous to a fault: ‘If you had a charity that you wanted to raise something for’, said another broker, ‘they’d often put a bucket in the middle of the floor on a Friday afternoon and fill it up, or make people fill it up.’ In all, they had a good name, and on the floor of the old Stock Exchange that mattered.[1]

I tell you this anecdote for two reasons. First, John Jenkins is a name we will hear again in coming episodes, because he actually did build a stock exchange. And second, it just captures the state of finance at the onset of the nineteen eighties – a bit threadbare, small-time, parochial. Careful – the kind of world that tidied the books every night and slept soundly on the takings, however meagre. Sid Jenkins died in 1981, and Anthony briefly became senior partner. A year later John became senior partner. That’s in 1982, when S Jenkins & Son was still the smallest firm of jobbers on the Exchange. In 1984 this same firm made a million pounds in a few minutes of trading. In 1986 it sold out to investment bank Guinness Mahon and thence to Japanese Giant Nomura. In 1987, the firm – now a trading desk in a global bank – lost £10 million in a day’s trading and clawed ...

Social interactions – rules and rituals, norms and codes of practice – are the glue that holds a stock market together. This was especially so in the open outcry markets of the twentieth century. The episode looks at the strange societies of Chicago’s pits and London’s ‘Old House’. What did it feel like to cram into a trading pit or inch your way up the Exchange’s social ladder, where cockney sparrows rubbed shoulders with the old elite? A meritocracy of sorts, so long as you were a man. This episode contains some strong language.

Transcript

Let’s step back to a different time. Imagine an enormous room, capped by a vast dome measuring 100 feet high and 70 feet in diameter, said to be on a par with those of the cathedrals of St Peter in Rome and St Paul in London. This was the great trading room of the London Stock Exchange, known as the Old House. A mottled marble faced its walls and pillars and the wags called it ‘Gorgonzola Hall’ after the blue cheese. There was not much furniture, just ramshackle chalkboards covered in figures. Each firm of traders – or jobbers – occupied a particular spot on the Exchange floor, where the chalkboards marked their ‘pitch’, while the brokers spent market hours in their ‘boxes’ at the edge of the floor. Business stayed in the family, and these pitches and boxes were often passed from father to son. During trading hours as many as 3000 people jostled under the dome, manning these pitches or circulating through the crowds.  The room was jammed with bodies, all male; women were not allowed even to set foot on the floor.

There were games. One etching shows young jobbers, wearing proto-hipster beards and frock coats, competing to throw a roll of ticker tape over a bar fixed high up in the dome. And there were pranks. Ehatever the weather, every self-respecting member of the Exchange would come to work with bowler hat and rolled umbrella. On a rainy day it was entertaining to unfurl a brolly, fill it with a confetti of shredded paper and roll it back up again. There were nicknames as sophisticated as the japes: one man was named the Chicken, another the Lighthouse because he was ‘always moving his head around and it reminded people of the light flashing on the top of a lighthouse’. Then there was ‘the Tortoise…he was a little bit round-shouldered, he always wore a bowler hat, brown suit, carried his umbrella and his nose would remind anybody that he was a tortoise. And he used to walk very slowly through the market.’ One short, very ugly man in the mining market was affectionately named Don’t Tread in It. When business was slow, on a Friday afternoon, songs would burst out: the jobbers would sing the Marseillaise to a supposedly French colleague and slam their desk lids – the clerks had old fashioned schoolroom desks – as cannon. A thousand male voices raised in song together, echoing under the dome: noise, camaraderie and the dreaded ‘banter’. A bygone age, a different world.[1]

And when was this? Oh, not so long ago: the Old House closed in 1966, the same year that England won the football World Cup and still very much living memory for some.

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?

Let’s take stock for a moment. In the last episode I poked fun at charmless Sixtus as we explored how equity can finance all kinds of n...

This episode takes an anecdotal wander through the business of financing start-ups. Our guide is Sixtus, an old-Etonian who imported ‘business angel’ investing to the UK. Along the way, I’m waspish about public schoolboys, perceptive about pickles, explore the difference between equity and debt, and wonder whether stock markets must always be about those billion dollar valuations.

Transcription  

I have long harboured a prejudice against old Etonians.  You can drink with them, or listen to their stories, or watch them on television – they’re everywhere when you start to look – but just don’t let them hold your wallet or take your significant other for coffee. I’m almost prepared to make an exception on that point for our present Archbishop of Canterbury, but no, I think not. And God forbid, don’t let them run your country. I used to try and sneak this snippet of wisdom into lectures. If you learn anything from me, I would intone, let it be this…Unfortunately, the spectacle of British politics over the last few years has made such warnings redundant. Cameron, Boris, Rees Mogg… I am almost speechless with rage when I see the damage done to our nation in pursuit of petty self-advancement.

Another deeply held prejudice involves the wearing of velvet collars, so when I spotted a photograph of JRM sporting one such, well, I felt like ‘some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken’. But this is beginning to sound like one of Rees-Mogg’s own man in the street moments so I am reluctantly forced to concede that I am unfairly singling out that great educational establishment. It would be more simple and accurate to say that one should never trust a former English public schoolboy. For those listening beyond the UK, a public school is – inexplicably – a private one. It’s an educational system built for empire, modelled on Sparta; the ancient world offered two models for a state, one based on democracy and philosophy, the other on military might and hierarchical caste segregation, and the Victorians chose…

Well, enough said. Back to its products. We are mendacious and unreliable. All we can do is talk. There’s James Dyson, the engineer who persuaded us all that vacuum cleaners should look like spaceships and campaigned for Brexit before shifting his factory to Singapore. Or youth icon, gangsta rapper and YouTube phenomenon KSI, who learned his vowels at the same school that I did. We are long on patter and short on substance. Have a look at the KSI youtube fight night if you doubt me on that.

On the other hand, that mixture of assured self-presentation and a natural economy with the actualité – in the words of the late Right Honourable Alan Clark, old Etonian, confessing to lying to Parliament – does suit us well for some occupations outside of politics. We make good actors, acerbic columnists, and amusing enough podcasters, I hope. And financiers. ‘There is,’ writes Michael Lewis in Liar’s Poker, ‘a genus of European, species English, to whom slick financial practice comes naturally. The word for them in the Euromarkets is spivs.’ And then, unusually, Lewis makes a wrong call. ‘Oddly,’ he writes, ‘we had no spivs. Our Europeans-especially our Englishmen-tended to be the refined products of the right schools.’ They, dear Michael, are the spivviest of all.

It seems appropriate, then, that the next step in our journey through stock-market skulduggery is guided by an old Etonian. His name is Sixtus (or something equally silly) and he invented ‘venture capital’ investing.

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.

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,

How did Chicago’s stockhouses lead to one of the greatest financial markets on earth? This episode explores how commerce and technology shaped the founding of the Chicago Board of Trade and gave birth to financial derivatives. It tells how the telegraph transformed trading, how the pits functioned as human computers turning pigs into prices, and how when we come to build our stock exchange we’ll have to get a building to fit.

Transcript

‘They went into a room from which there is no returning for hogs. It was a long, narrow room, with a gallery along it for visitors. At the head there was a great iron wheel, about twenty feet in circumference, with rings here and there along its edge…it began slowly to revolve, and then the men upon each side of it sprang to work. They had chains which they fastened about the leg of the nearest hog, and the other end of the chain they hooked into one of the rings upon the wheel. So, as the wheel turned, a hog was suddenly jerked off his feet and borne aloft.’

This, I should say, comes from Upton Sinclair’s novel ‘The Jungle’, published in 1906. He continues:

‘At the top of the wheel he was shunted off upon a trolley, and went sailing down the room. And meantime another was swung up, and then another, and another, until there was a double line of them, each dangling by a foot and kicking in frenzy—and squealing.

…Heedless of all these things, the men upon the floor were going about their work. Neither squeals of hogs nor tears of visitors made any difference to them; one by one they hooked up the hogs, and one by one with a swift stroke they slit their throats. There was a long line of hogs, with squeals and lifeblood ebbing away together; until at last each started again, and vanished with a splash into a huge vat of boiling water.

It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was porkmaking by machinery, porkmaking by applied mathematics…’[1]

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. In the last episode, I spent some time explaining why finance matters, and why we should take stock markets seriously, both as engines for inequality – which they surely are – and visions of possibility, which I hope they might be. Over the coming episodes 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?

Well, from one happy animal to another less so…

You may be wondering why I began this episode with a graphic bit of hog slaughter. My apologies if you found that a little strong, and I hope you are not listening over your bacon and eggs. I said before that markets – not just stock markets – have places, histories and politics and are shaped by the customs and beliefs of their participants. In the last episode, for example, we saw how “agency theory”, a little bit of academic vogue from the 1980s has come to dominate the relationship between companies and their stakeholders. But bricks and mortar – or chips and bits – also matter.[2] The material architecture of a market has a great deal to do with the way it works. That is what I will be focusing on today.  Think about it: Ebay and a car boot sale are both full of householders selling second-hand items to other householders, but inhabit different spatial structures. Those structures cause them to work in different ways.

How did Chicago’s stockhouses lead to one of the greatest financial markets on earth? This episode explores how commerce and technology shaped the founding of the Chicago Board of Trade and gave birth to financial derivatives. It tells how the telegraph transformed trading, how the pits functioned as human computers turning pigs into prices, and how when we come to build our stock exchange we’ll have to get a building to fit.

Transcript

‘They went into a room from which there is no returning for hogs. It was a long, narrow room, with a gallery along it for visitors. At the head there was a great iron wheel, about twenty feet in circumference, with rings here and there along its edge…it began slowly to revolve, and then the men upon each side of it sprang to work. They had chains which they fastened about the leg of the nearest hog, and the other end of the chain they hooked into one of the rings upon the wheel. So, as the wheel turned, a hog was suddenly jerked off his feet and borne aloft.’

This, I should say, comes from Upton Sinclair’s novel ‘The Jungle’, published in 1906. He continues:

‘At the top of the wheel he was shunted off upon a trolley, and went sailing down the room. And meantime another was swung up, and then another, and another, until there was a double line of them, each dangling by a foot and kicking in frenzy—and squealing.

…Heedless of all these things, the men upon the floor were going about their work. Neither squeals of hogs nor tears of visitors made any difference to them; one by one they hooked up the hogs, and one by one with a swift stroke they slit their throats. There was a long line of hogs, with squeals and lifeblood ebbing away together; until at last each started again, and vanished with a splash into a huge vat of boiling water.

It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was porkmaking by machinery, porkmaking by applied mathematics…’[1]

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. In the last episode, I spent some time explaining why finance matters, and why we should take stock markets seriously, both as engines for inequality – which they surely are – and visions of possibility, which I hope they might be. Over the coming episodes 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?

Well, from one happy animal to another less so…

You may be wondering why I began this episode with a graphic bit of hog slaughter. My apologies if you found that a little strong, and I hope you are not listening over your bacon and eggs. I said before that markets – not just stock markets – have places, histories and politics and are shaped by the customs and beliefs of their participants. In the last episode, for example, we saw how “agency theory”, a little bit of academic vogue from the 1980s has come to dominate the relationship between companies and their stakeholders. But bricks and mortar – or chips and bits – also matter.[2] The material architecture of a market has a great deal to do with the way it works. That is what I will be focusing on today.  Think about it: Ebay and a car boot sale are both full of householders selling second-hand items to other householders, but inhabit different spatial structures. Those structures cause them to work in different ways.

Finance matters. We’re off to build a stock exchange, but first of all I’ll spend a little time explaining why financial markets matter. This episode explores how financial markets – a crucial mechanism for the distribution of wealth – are implicated in our present political malaise and looks at some of the ways that finance has squeezed us over the last three decades.

Transcription

A famous philosopher once said – ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ It was Adam Smith, of course, born not far down the road from me in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, and the father of modern economics. He once walked to neighbouring Dunfermline in his dressing gown, apparently, so deep was he in thoughts, musings like this, and ‘Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.’

From those words, published in 1776, a whole global order has sprung. We can call it capitalism, and at its centre lies a strange entity, so much part of our lives that we simply take it for granted.

I’m talking about the stock exchange.

Hello, and welcome to this podcast.

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. Over the coming episodes I will be revealing finance as you have never thought of it before. 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? We will see that stock markets have places, and histories and politics. And we will come to understand just how influential stock-markets are in our everyday lives.

In this first episode I’m not going to do much building. Instead, I’m going to talk to you about why the world of finance really matters. I want to step back from the nitty-gritty of the project – we’ll see enough of that as we move along – and think about the role that financial markets play in society. You see, we can’t help noticing that things have changed in the last decade. Britain has fallen into disrepair. In the regions jobs have evaporated. In the cities casual work and portfolio careers have become the norm and it’s impossible to buy a house. Food banks are rife and one in five children lives below the poverty line. Brexit is looming, a howl of rage – as one commentator put it – against the state of the nation. I daresay swathes of North America and Europe feel much the same. But what has this to do with financial markets?

Well, the world has changed and financial markets stand at the heart of these transformations. They are not the only problem of course – but it is fair to say that finance is the mechanism on which global inequality pivots. Take risk. It’s everywhere in business, the other side of the coin from profits. The big question is who should carry it, and at the moment the answer seems to be the poor. Risk has been outsourced. It’s experienced as precarious employment, social exclusion, or plain, old-fashioned poverty, while financial markets – institutions that exist solely to manage risk – have pronounced themselves risk free. You can buy a bond rated triple A – as safe as the debt of the strongest governments – and still expect a return. Short-termism has prevented sustainable, long-term investment. At the same time, the rewards that supposedly come from taking risk – future profits – have been privatised among the financial elite, and they have done so through those same mechanisms that have shifted the risk itself: financial markets.

Finance matters. We’re off to build a stock exchange, but first of all I’ll spend a little time explaining why financial markets matter. This episode explores how financial markets – a crucial mechanism for the distribution of wealth – are implicated in our present political malaise and looks at some of the ways that finance has squeezed us over the last three decades.

Transcription

A famous philosopher once said – ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ It was Adam Smith, of course, born not far down the road from me in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, and the father of modern economics. He once walked to neighbouring Dunfermline in his dressing gown, apparently, so deep was he in thoughts, musings like this, and ‘Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.’

From those words, published in 1776, a whole global order has sprung. We can call it capitalism, and at its centre lies a strange entity, so much part of our lives that we simply take it for granted.

I’m talking about the stock exchange.

Hello, and welcome to this podcast.

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. Over the coming episodes I will be revealing finance as you have never thought of it before. 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? We will see that stock markets have places, and histories and politics. And we will come to understand just how influential stock-markets are in our everyday lives.

In this first episode I’m not going to do much building. Instead, I’m going to talk to you about why the world of finance really matters. I want to step back from the nitty-gritty of the project – we’ll see enough of that as we move along – and think about the role that financial markets play in society. You see, we can’t help noticing that things have changed in the last decade. Britain has fallen into disrepair. In the regions jobs have evaporated. In the cities casual work and portfolio careers have become the norm and it’s impossible to buy a house. Food banks are rife and one in five children lives below the poverty line. Brexit is looming, a howl of rage – as one commentator put it – against the state of the nation. I daresay swathes of North America and Europe feel much the same. But what has this to do with financial markets?

Well, the world has changed and financial markets stand at the heart of these transformations. They are not the only problem of course – but it is fair to say that finance is the mechanism on which global inequality pivots. Take risk. It’s everywhere in business, the other side of the coin from profits. The big question is who should carry it, and at the moment the answer seems to be the poor. Risk has been outsourced. It’s experienced as precarious employment, social exclusion, or plain, old-fashioned poverty, while financial markets – institutions that exist solely to manage risk – have pronounced themselves risk free. You can buy a bond rated triple A – as safe as the debt of the strongest governments – and still expect a return. Short-termism has prevented sustainable, long-term investment. At the same time, the rewards that supposedly come from taking risk – future profits – have been privatised among the financial elite, and they have done so through those same mechanisms that have shifted the risk itself: financial markets.