The City of London claims it is the powerhouse of the UK economy. Rachel Reeves has called it our ‘Jewel in the Crown'. But actually, it's much more like a parasite, extracting value from the rest of the economy for the advantage of a few at cost to most in this country.
The audio verswion is here:
This is the transcript:
What do the 678,000 people who work in the City of London do for us? It seems to me a pretty important question to ask because I don't really know the answer. What I do know is that according to latest data, and I'm looking at it, there are 8, 600 people who actually live in the City of London. And 678, 000 people apparently work there, according to the City of London Corporation, which runs the administration of the City area, which is a very small part of London as a whole, remember.
So, what do those people do? Well, the City of London Corporation does actually provide some information. The number's gone up dramatically. It's actually increased by something like 20 per cent since 2019 - since Covid began. Over a hundred thousand more people are working in the City than were before. There is no obvious explanation for that.
What else do we know about what those people do? 32 per cent of them work in financial services. 25 per cent work in professional services. That is lawyers, accountants and other related activities. Fifteen per cent work in tech, supporting financial services and professional services. Twelve per cent are in support business services, running the properties, all the ancillary facilities that those people need, and 15 per cent are others, baristas in coffee shops and everything else that a large city requires to keep going. In fact, quite a lot of retailing, of course, because those people have money to spend, particularly in lunchtimes and after work, and therefore there are things for people to do in those retail activities.
So this is a population that is working very heavily in financial services and all support facilities.
It's a very male population. 62 per cent of the people who work in the City of London are male, and only 38 per cent are women. Guess what? The salaries are skewed that way.
It's a young population. 56 per cent of workers are under the age of 40, which is way out of line with the country as a whole.
It's a very well-paid population, although I don't have as clear data on that as I do on some of the other figures.
These are young, well-paid people.
Quite surprisingly, 32 per cent of them come from the European Economic Area, and they are not, therefore, here for the long term. 17 per cent, in fact, come from other areas outside Europe. Only 51 per cent are from the UK as a matter of origin.
So, it's a surprisingly diverse population that works there, which is not that surprising because very large numbers of the companies that work in the City of London are not UK-owned, so they are seconding staff from wherever they might be to work here temporarily before they return again. But what we end up with is a view of a place that is completely abnormal.
But that doesn't explain what they all do. According to the data, roughly, and again I'm going to look at some different information, one in every five financial services jobs in the UK is in that tiny area around the Bank of England.
Four in five are outside, and that's not too surprising. They are, if you could still find them, routine day-to-day bankers. They are accountants. They are lawyers who will do wills and conveyancing and everything like that, which is still very often considered to be financial services by the way.
So this is the oddity about the City. It does something different from financial services outside the City.
And that something different is that it manages vast amounts of money.
The amounts of money in question are staggering. They include pension funds. So, for example, the biggest pension fund manager in the UK is Blackrock Investment Management, based in the City of London. It has £92 billion under its management.
And there are plenty of other funds of the same size. The next biggest is one that is more familiar by name to many people, Legal and General. The point is, that most of what the City does is either manage other people's money or speculate with other people's money.
Because that is what the stock market is about.
That is what the future exchanges, which trade in all sorts of commodities, everything from copper to wheat to orange juice if you so wish, that's what they do.
There are shipping exchanges where you can hire any type of ship into the future.
There's the Lloyd's Insurance Market, which may underpin the car insurance policy that you've got, but might equally not, but which is a much more specialised financial services centre than is the standard insurance company.
Now, I'm not disputing that some of these things are of value. Maybe Lloyd's is.
Maybe it is worthwhile having a shipping exchange.
Maybe we do need to be able to trade, to some degree, commodities into the future.
But what we don't need to do is speculate in the way that we do.
It is thought that a hundred times the volume of real foreign exchange transactions are actually undertaken for the purposes of speculation alone.
There is vast amounts of trading that takes place on the London Stock Exchange every day that is purely for speculative reasons trying to make tiny profit margins out of literally dealing in billions of pounds worth of funds, all in the space of seconds in very many cases.
Vast numbers of very well people spend their lives setting up the tech to do this and then managing this and then glowing in the glory of supposedly having succeeded in doing this.
Does it matter? Does this add value to our society? I would beg to suggest it doesn't.
Lord Keynes, John Maynard Keynes, the greatest, in my opinion, economist of the 20th century, knew a lot about stock exchanges because he was actually a very successful stock exchange investor. He reckoned that in reality, all the stock exchange investments that needed to take place every day could be done in a period of 10 minutes, after which the markets could be closed and the people engaged could do something more useful.
Is that still true, because he was talking in the 1930s? I don't know. We haven't extrapolated the data from then to now, but let's be clear. There are vastly more people working in the City now than there were then, and there's vastly more money engaged than there was then, because wealth has actually grown because of the scale of pension fund management that now exists. But I suspect that, in principle, he was right, and he still would be right. Because if we actually limited the activities of the City so that only those transactions that took place were those that were for the real benefit of society, and not purely for extracting rewards out of the money that had been entrusted to the care of the City itself, then we would need very many fewer people in that City, and very much less capacity within it, to undertake trades that are wholly unnecessary.
I can't tell you precisely how many of those six hundred and seventy-eight thousand people aren't needed in the City of London. But I can tell you it's a great many of them.
And I can tell you that they're very well paid.
And I can tell you that the only reason that they are very well paid is because they extract value from your savings, from our society, and from the way in which taxes should be paid but aren't as a consequence of their planning. And so much more besides.
They are fundamentally running a parasitical operation that extracts value rather than adds value. The city likes to claim that it adds £97 billion of value to the UK GDP, which actually isn't that big when the total UK GDP is over two and a half trillion, which is £2,500 billion, which puts the £97 billion in context, But, even if that was true, that they added £97 billion, they have not counted the negatives.
They've only counted how much they were paid to extract value, when in fact, if the resources, those young people, those able people, those well-paid people, were reallocated within our society, to do something that was much more useful - anything from teaching, to innovation, to managing services that provided care, or whatever it might be - we as a society would be much better off.
And that's my problem with the City. It just manages money. And managing money is overall a pretty useless activity. I'm not disputing that a bit needs to happen. We clearly need routine banking. We clearly do need, as I have said, insurance. We clearly do need some pension fund management, although, actually, not as much as you think, because most pension fund managers are pretty lousy at their jobs.
Instead, what we need are people doing real things that add real value for the benefit of real people, because we can't eat money, but we can consume care, and we can consume the well-being that is created by the added value of people doing something that is of benefit directly to improve the well-being of people in the UK.
I don't think the City's doing that.
We really do need to rethink what it's all about. Because instead of seeing it as Rachel Reeves does, as the hub and the jewel in the crown of the British economy - and she used that phrase, jewel in the crown, recently - I see it as a parasite, sitting on the back of the productive capacity of ordinary people in the UK who are having to suffer the consequence of this place extracting value from them.
It's time we reframed what we are about. And if we did, the UK economy might begin to behave like other economies do, which do not have this parasitic financial services sector. And we might all be better off as a result.
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Whatever happened to he Robin Hood tax proposal?
Pretty much given up, even by its main proponents.
Three Cheers for this.
I’ve just read “The Finance Curse”, by Nicholas Shaxson. It was published 2018, and things have happened since then. But even then his estimate of how much the City costs the UK economy is horrifying.
Richard’s post touches on a nightmare I am having.
For the £ to have value, holders of other currencies (e.g. $s or €s) must want to exchange them for $s. You can’t create $s by printing £s.
The UK has a problem, since it imports about 40% of its food and about 40% of its energy. That requires a lot of other currencies.
The conventional view of trade is that it mainly concerns exporting and importing goods, though services may be mentioned. But does the UK export nearly enough goods to maintain the value of the £? If not, what are the services the UK exports? Are they primarily Tax Avoidance and Money Laundering? Without these “services” we would not be able to buy the food and energy we need.
If you find an element of truth in this bleak assessment, it explains a lot of what Reeves is doing, and why the £ exchange rate and stock market remain steady.
If a Labour Government were to make a serious attempt to address inequality or improve people’s lives, we would simply starve and freeze. Ever the optimist.
During my life the value of the £ has fallen by about 60% compared to the dollar and the world has not ended
Brexit was deeply damaging but we are carrying
I think you are catastrophising about suboptimality. You need to spot the differences.
Richard,
Apologies for not being clearer. Try another way.
When a US company buys British goods priced in £s it exchanges $s for £s and takes and keeps the goods.
When a US company buys a British company, again it exchanges $s for £s. However, in this case it will repatriate the earnings and over time convert £s back into $s.
Effectively, in the first case the UK EARNS the $s, in the second case it BORROWS them. In the long run, the UK will have to exchange more £s for $s than the $s it received in the first place.
The food and energy the UK needs are goods. The £s exchanged for $s will not come back.
The question becomes: What proportion of the $s converted into £s are earnings, and what proportion are equivalent to loans? This is what frightens me. Not that the £ may fall in value, but that there isn’t a sustainable way forward.
My answer is exactly the same
Why on earth do you think that there is an unmanageable problem? Change happens. We deal with it. Move on. It’s only an exchange rate. They move. So what? I don’t get why you think Armageddon awaits.
The City has dominated our political system for, at least, a century. in 1925 Winston Churchill put the pound back on gold at 1914 rates. It killed a lot of exports and indirectly was responsible for the General Strike.
I also note the Uk level of investment is one of the lowest in the G7
https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/jun/18/investment-in-uk-has-trailed-other-g7-countries-since-mid-1990s-ippr-says
Joseph Stiglitz has just advised the Democratic party to dump neo-liberalism and return to its progressive roots.
The question is -is the City a net asset or net liability?
Great (but sad, depressing) analysis of the fundamentally parasitic role of the ‘rentier’ class and its functionaries.
It occurs to me that in previous eras – say 150 years ago – the same extractive processes were carried out by a similar class of administrators, but overseas, extracting value in the form of physical materials from the British empire: cotton, sugar, tea, coffee and the literal extraction of mineral mining. Some undoubtedly brought benefits, roads, railways, sanitation… The main effect, though, being to suppress or even reverse the development of the colonies. Something from which even now they struggle to recover (and suffer further extraction via the loans that the City and others force onto them, while governments provide paltry sums in development assistance).
Now, that extractive effort is applied to ‘our own people’, fuelling ever-increasing inequalities.
John Lanchester in LRB 12 September – an interesting piece on financial services
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n17/john-lanchester/for-every-winner-a-loser
An extract:
“The total value of all the economic activity in the world is estimated at $105 trillion. . The value of the financial derivatives which arise from this activity – that’s the subsequent trading – is $667 trillion. That makes it the biggest business in the world. And in terms of the things it produces, that business is useless. It does nothing and adds no value. It is just one speculator betting against another and for every winner, on every single transaction, there is an exactly equivalent loser.”
I agree
Agree. In term of electricity – traded volumes are (roughly) 4 – 6x greater than delivered. The claim is that this deliver “liquidity” to the market. Shite. Most power companies have elec trading desks. Legit. Many banks (Morgan Stanley) have prop-desks – to speculate on elec markets – not legit. I’d close em down. They do nothing & the fiction that they “balance supply & demand” is just that – a fiction.
Agreed
Incisive observation. It’s always been obvious to me that trading is a zero sum game. Hence the net gain from trades across all city traders must be nil. So how do they make so much money?
Presumably it all comes from the “management fees” that they charge. In other words, are we simply paying them out of our savings to run a self-serving gambling den?
By and large yes
Although there are some real trades which also pay fees, by they are by far the minority
I want to start by saying that I agree with everything you are saying here, and I have a potentially controversial opinion to add 😉
I’m a big fan of the idea of a Tobin tax – a tax on financial transactions. I’d be interested to know how much a Tobin tax would raise (it obviously depends on the rate of the tax, and the scope, but I’m sure there are some estimates that would be useful). Once I started thinking about this, I realised that levying a tax on financial transaction would also have an effect on the number of financial transactions, reducing those at the margin that are hardly profitable – maybe many of the automated trades. Increasing the transaction tax would reduce the volume of trades, and so possibly the number of people employed performing or managing those trades (I don’t know what they do exactly).
Then I realised that this would have a negative effect on tax revenue as some of those people would not get paid, and I wondered if in a round-about way, the income tax revenue on those (sometimes) obscene city salaries could be thought of as a kind of financial transaction tax. I’m not trying to troll here, its an honest question.
Anyway I will try to do some research and report back, but I’d love some opinions from people who know more about this than I do. I’d love to know what is the rate of a transaction tax that maximises the revenue from the tax while minimising the reduction in income tax from city salaries.
I disagree. We don’t tax because we need to in the way you describe. That is because tax funds nothing. Money creation funds government spending. We tax to control inflation and for social purposes. Permitting the City to exist so it might be taxed defeats any social purposes. An FTT would be vastly better – so long as the target revenue is zero (by ending excessive trading).
Interesting read, thank you. Could you please tell us more about the influence of the financial sector on business? I recently read an old book from 90s by Will Hutton which sounded depressingly apt for today, and found that banks were very short-term and extractive in their lending to manufacturers back in Victorian times. Other countries have banks whose purpose is to lend to business, to know the timeframes and percentages that enable investment to update or expand a business. This must link to investment in new green technologies, improvements in housing stock etc. Extractive, short-term lending isn’t appropriate for any legitimate business, and would slow down production and research in building a more sustainable country.
The Ciry exists to extract value from business, not to serve it. Will Hutton was right – and we discussed this recently. The job of banking is to facilitate investment. It doesn’t do that. It funds speculation, at best.
Here in Silicon Fen, investment has produced a huge crop of a certain kind of start-up. Pretty much the first question asked of budding entrepreneurs is “what is your exit route?” New companies are usually designed to be attractive to some buyer within five years — maybe a trade sale to a big player in the relevant field, maybe a listing on the AIM, or one of several other routes. Almost all investors require that the management focuses on ‘growth’, and that results in many mad decisions — often things like scaling back R&D as the exit is approached, to make the P&L look more attractive. Pressure from early-stage investors tends to encourage a ‘boom or bust’ approach; investors usually expect out of every ten investments, one will go broke, eight will pretty much bump along near break-even, and the tenth will have to generate the profit to cover the losses from the others. They don’t much care which you become, as long as you stand a chance of being that tenth company.
What a way to run an economy!
Agreed
Having spent 40 years in this business I would offer this thought.
You are correct; financial services are a “tax” on the real economy but they do fulfil a crucial function. They get money from those that have it to those that need it – from savers to borrowers…. and this requires some “transformation” and involves risk. Banks take credit risk and maturity mismatch to allow loans to be made to people/companies and financed by customer deposits. This is incredibly important for the real economy and it makes sense to aggregate some of the risk and manage it in one place (not all – the loss of local bank managers who know the local businesses’ credit quality is a problem) and that place is the City. Prior to deregulation in the early 80s banks, largely, engaged in this activity – lending to firms, financing trade etc.. All other activity was about intermediating transactions in equities, bonds, commodities (FX trading was the exception – still done by banks because settlement in FX is, by definition, cross border). So, for all its faults, the banking system is necessary and should be centralised to a considerable extent.
So, what about the rest? It all started in a coffee house (Lloyd’s) where ship owners met and insurance was arranged. I am sure that ship owners used to drink/transact in many coffee houses but for some reason, Lloyds was most conducive to business and “liquidity begets liquidity” and before you know it Lloyd’s is THE place to go to insure your vessel. The key question for all marketplaces is “how do we bring as many people together at one place and time to do their business most efficiently”… and this changes depending on what is traded and how technology has advanced. So far so good – this is important activity for real people and the real economy. “Back in the day” I worked as a Fund Manager and transacted German Government bonds at “The Fixing” where, once a day, buyers and sellers would bring their orders and the price was agreed under the auspices of the official broker and the Bundesbank. We got our “ducks in a row” in the morning, gave our orders to the broker and it all took about an hour or so to get through the list of bonds…. and then it was off to lunch. (Keynes was right…. but 10mins was a bit optimistic). Overall, a sensible way to do business – so what went wrong?
De-regulation. I liken it to the relaxation of alcohol sales laws. The purveyors of booze (PoBs) used to make a decent living and drinkers where tucked up in bed by 10pm (yes, City pubs closed at 9pm. But the PoBs argued that “free choice” should allow more points of sale and longer pub opening hours. Of course, this had nothing to do with making more money – it was high principle (yeh – really). The government of the day were lobbied hard and agreed to it. Result? Greater booze consumption, longer working hours for bar staff, more collateral damage to society….but “trebles all round” (as Private Eye would say) for the owners of the PoBs. Same in Finance – we let the tail wag the dog.
Now, deregulation increased profits for the financial sector… but the bulk of these profits are made at the expense of foreign users of our marketplace. So, is that not good for UK plc? No – we are not a plc! … and the collateral damage and waste or resources suggest it has not been good except for a small number of people (of which I am one).
How do we put the genie back in the bottle? Well, that is tough… and I have written too much already. Perhaps another day.
I have never said we do not need a banking system.
I argue we need bonds.
I see a reason for a stock exchange.
What I see no need for is the profit extraction industry designed to exploit savers, which we have.
And let me take issue with you on banking. As all central bankers agree, it is not an intermediary turning savers funds into loans. It creates money under licence that then creat3s deposits. In other words, banks do not create the value you suggest – they exist to assist the upward flow of wealth. More profit extraction then. So, I am afraid I disagree quite strongly with you on that issue.
I completely agree that banks don’t intermediate between savers and borrowers (and it’s not what I say).
They lend to borrowers and in doing so, they take credit risk and deliver maturity transformation – essential in any economy. My point is that this IS adding value and we need some of those folk that work in the City to deliver it. Now, there is a lot wrong with our banks but we do need them.
Ok
Now we agree
And there is undoubted value in providing an appropriate range of credit
If banks facilitated savings into capital they might add value. But they don’t.
This number of people it seems to me are those that are required to do nothing but service capital acquisition by the rich.
That is a lot of people involved in chiefly just moving money around from the many to the few, cogs in the machine that props the whole thing up, looking for and creating opportunities to sustain capital’s hegemony over us all.
It is a solemn reminder that only human beings really know how to create systems of theft, whether through markets or AI.
In this context Richard I assume you’ve heard about the report just published by a committee of MPs about the FCA?
In which they really put the boot in. Accusing it of being incompetent at best and dishonest at worst.
I assume, when your schedule allows, to be commenting on this.
I have heard about it
It dues not surprise me at all
I have not had time to read it
It is depressing that you aren’t in the least surprised/shocked Richard. I have to say I am a little, though no doubt you and others on here would say I was being naive about this.
Perhaps those here who have knowledge of the City can comment; Col Smithers or Clive Parry perhaps? Are we seeing yet another instance of regulatory failure or capture or is it simply the case that the FCA is under resourced to do it’s job properly?
Thanks in advance to those with greater knowledge than myself who might comment on this depressing revelation.
The FCA was set up to be captured from the outset, and it was, as planned.
“FCA is ‘incompetent at best, dishonest at worst’, claim MPs and peers” (26 Nov 2024) The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/nov/26/fca-mps-peers-financial-conduct-authority-appg-report
“MPs brand UK financial regulator ‘incompetent'” (26 Nov 2024), BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp9z332j4npo
Full “Report on the Call for Evidence about The Financial Conduct Authority” @ Investment Fraud and Fairer Financial Services
https://www.appgifffs.org/
Maybe 40% are busy laundering dirty money (insert unhappy emoji face here)?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/14/nearly-40-of-dirty-money-is-laundered-in-london-and-uk-crown-dependenies
I know several young people at my sports club who work in the City – must say I zone out when they tell me what they ‘do’. I do know they are worked hard. But most of the work is not for the common good. They tend to be selected on the basis of having little or no politics, certainly on the centre-left.
This true description of what the City of London does neatly sums up why Scotland will have to make preparations in advance of independence to establish a Scottish National Pension Fund (NPF). It will not be in the interests of Scotland to allow citizens pension contributions/savings to be managed in the City of London, which would then be in a foreign country and using a foreign currency. The NPF can be legally established by a mandatory requirement for all new workers starting work after completing full time education, and their employers, to pay contributions into an NPF. The legislation can also mandate the NPF to invest the funds to support the Scottish economy. Whilst existing workers might choose to leave their pension savings in funds managed in London, they can be offered the opportunity to transfer their savings and pension rights into the NPF, which would be supporting a Defined Benefit/earnings related national pension scheme. It wouldn’t make sense to continue to provide tax relief on pension contributions being made into funds managed in London but people could be allowed a 2 years “option period” to allow them time to make arrangements to transfer into the NPF. I think this would be a way to diminish the harmful role of speculative finance on the Scottish economy as well as providing a financially viable means to restore earnings related pensions for all
David Byrne says:
US and other asset management and private equity companies and investment banks proliferate in the City of London. It is apparent that approx. 100 public companies have been taken private in the past year (FT reference).
Such financial extraction is in part helped by city facilitators in an environment where stocks are cheap, the FCA is impotent, government watches from the sidelines and shareholders just take the money and run.
But such asset stripping is good for growth as it is recorded as Foreign Direct Investment.
Discuss…………
Much to agree with
My paternal grandfather worked in the Company Secretaries department of Joseph Nathan ltd who became part of Glaxo
My father recalled going with him to the Midland Bank in Poultry and my Grandfather saying that the magnificent building was constructed from funds stolen from British Industry
Funnily enough my father ended up working there as it was one of the few jobs available in the Depression but that’s another story
Sounds like my Grandfather was right nearly a century ago
Watch Mary Poppins
The old Midland City HQ in Poultry is now an upmarket restaurant and hotel. Much the same has happened to the old NatWest HQ in Lothbury.
There’s an irony in there somewhere.
Richard
The big increases in jobs is as a result of the rise of the compliance industry.
But it’s not just in finance. It’s also in education, health and small companies .
I came across a blog on this a few days ago. I.ll post it if I can find it.
Accepted as an argument
Obviously true
The gain is less clear when so much that needs to be done e.g. a truly effective Companies House is not done.
From what little I have read of the history of the City of London I understand that after the great fire of London in 1666 in his work with Sir Christopher Wren to rebuild Dr Robert Hook installed a private alchemical laboratory beneath the Monument marking the event. In moments of despairing whimsy I wonder whether this parasitic iteration of making vast amounts of money out of thin air is just am arcane gentlemen’s club that glories in turning base metal into gold. In which case Reeves jewel might be better seen as the jewel in crown of the revelatory biblical end times whore of Babylon.
“For on the macro, society-wide level, there must be a growth in indebtedness of the economy when assets are traded at rising prices.
This indebtedness takes the form of both rising commitments for the real sector to finance asset transaction out of wages and profit, and rising actual debt levels. When the asset was sold at a profit, someone else bought the asset at the new, higher price. He or she financed this either by diverting liquidity away from real-sector transactions, or by borrowing – at higher levels than did the first buyer. Therefore asset price booms are accompanied by rising debt and by a slowdown in real-sector nominal growth.”
– Bezemer, Credit and Crisis Through an Accounting Lens
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/15766/
Much to agree with
Mark Twain once wrote, well over a century ago, that “Stockbrokers are the people who advise the rich on how to invest until all their money has gone.” Not much has changed since then.
Costs are real in the investment world, but performance is only a promise. Yet year after year, investors hope to do better than those market returns – known as beta in the trade – as they search for alpha. This is the outperforming fund or fund manager, the genius who, for a pittance, will make us a fortune. This never happens, not only because common sense tells us that no one gives away gold ingots, but for technical reasons.
Academics long since discovered that most of what should be known about companies and their prospects is known – the efficient market hypothesis or EMH – and Burton Malkiel in a “Random walk down Wall Street” proved conclusively that stock pickers cannot beat the market on a consistent basis. This is not to say that no fund managers are better than others, only that their greater skill cannot be predicted in advance. So, buy the index for pennies rather than pounds to fund Auberon Shyte’s new Barbour jacket, in most cases.
The trouble is that humanity is a pattern seeking species, none more so than stock market investors. Patters can be made to fit any series of figures, but the beauty of the fit means nothing in terms of its ability to predict the future. Randomness is part of life, and of markets as well as individual shares. Investors should remember, and concentrate on cost, which is a known and not on promised superior performance, a very definite unknown.
Agreed, entirely.
Very true. It’s a case of what I call the “Anyone, Everyone” fallacy. A small fund might be able to trade cleverly and beat the market, but for every one of those there will be another that tried and lost. Big funds cannot beat the market, because they ARE the market. The market is simply the aggregate price at which stocks are changing hands, and the bulk of those trades are by the big funds.
It’s like lotteries. They are promoted with the implication that Anyone can win, which is true. But not Everyone can win, because the winners’ winnings are paid by the losers. (I always find it curious that people who habitually enter lotteries are so happy when they see others winning – rather than thinking “that’s my money you’ve got”.)
So although it’s possible for Anyone to beat the market, it’s not possible for Everyone to do it.
The USA of course has its own version of the fallacy: “Anyone can be President” …
Rachel Reeves – the City of London’s useful idiot. https://dearscotland.substack.com/p/rachel-reeves-the-city-of-londons