Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close --- Episode 35

                                    THE MONEY GAME 

     In this new market. . . billions can flow in and out of an economy in seconds. So powerful has this force of money become that some observers now see the hot-money set becoming a sort of shadow world government---one that is irretrievably eroding the concept of the sovereign power of a nation state. 

                    "Hot Money,"Business Week, March 20, 1995, 46




     The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented . . . If you want to be slaves of the bankers, and pay the costs of your own slavery, then let the banks create money.

                  Lord Josiah Stamp, former director, Bank of England 
                                                  (1937) 


   Each day, half a million to a million people arise as dawn reaches their part of the world, turn on their computers, and leave the real world of people, things, and nature to immerse themselves in playing the world's most lucrative computer game : the money game. On-line they enter a cyberspace fantasy world constructed of numbers that represent money and complex rules by which the money can be converted into a seemingly infinite variety of forms, each with its own distinctive risks and reproductive qualities. Through their interactions, the players engage in competitive transactions aimed at acquiring for their own accounts the money that other players hold. Players can also pyramid the amount of money in play by borrowing from one another and bidding up prices. They can also purchase a great variety of exotic financial instruments that allow them to leverage their own funds without actually borrowing. It is played like a game. But the consequences are real. 
   The story of economic globalization is only partly a tale of the fantasy world of Stratos dwellers and the dreams of global empire builders. Another story of impersonal forces is at play, deeply embedded in our institutional systems ---a tale of money and how its evolution as an institution is transforming human societies in ways that no one intended toward ends that are inimical to the human interest. It is a tale of the pernicious side of the market's invisible hand, of the tendency of an unrestrained market to reorient itself away from the efficient PRODUCTION of wealth to the EXTRACTION and CONCENTRATION of wealth. It is a tragic tale of how good and thoughtful people have become trapped in serving, even creating, a system devoted to the unrestrained pursuit of greed, producing outcomes they neither seek nor condone.
   Although the consequences are global, our primary focus is on the United States because, since World War II, the United States has had the dominant role in shaping the global economy and its institutions. Thus, there has been a tendency for the strengths and dysfunctions of the global system to be revealed first in the United States and then spread throughout the world.