Finance - I suspect things will go back to normal!

I have to hold my hands up – finance and I are not bed fellows, not even close. It’s as confusing for me as it is a dirty word. That said, you don’t have to know a lot about fiancé or even how it works, to know that finance breeds finance, or rather money breeds money.

When the top 1% of the wealthiest in the world own as much as the combined wealth of the bottom 50%, or that literally the majority of the world’s wealth lies in the hands of a few hundred people - not thousands or millions, but hundreds, then you know that we have a major problem.

The story of finance and how it has come grown from a simple means of exchange is incredible. You’d be forgiven for thinking that we’ve always had currency but of course in the great mists of time it is only a relatively young kid on the block, and even more latterly, the modern-day market systems that go with it.

The modern-day market is not that old – we are effectively talking decades as opposed to centuries. And yet, it has become a monster where growth and wealth has not come to maturity through the proverbial blood, sweat and tears, but rather has relied on the creation of debt, insurance, ‘investment’ of pensions, the privatisation of public utilities and state apparatus, and is based on projected income by people who think they can predict the future.

Ultimately, the risks are perpetrated by a few but when the losses rain down it is society that weathers the storm. And all of this within an industry that is self-regulating, and any attempt to manage or supervise it is met with the threat of ‘we’ll take our business elsewhere,’ and so, invariably very little changes, and the whole circus begins in earnest again.

Like most, I feel powerless to do anything and those we vote into power once every five years in the hope that things might change, evidently leads to a greater sense of hopelessness as the opportunities to ‘reign in’ finance or even impose a greater level of accountability just seems to dissipate as issues such as Brexit, the NHS, job creation and of course at the time of writing, Coronavirus, come to dominate the political landscape, and any discussion re finance is dressed up in the narrative, or the daily drivel that is ‘The Economy.’

I really wonder if we’ll ever mange to curtail or bring some control to the financial industry. Now that the UK Government (I don’t know what the story is in other countries) will have to claw back all the money that it has had to stump up during this pandemic, I fear the Financial Industry will have much more of a say in our lives for decades to come, and not for the better.