{"id":88807,"date":"2025-12-31T14:21:56","date_gmt":"2025-12-31T14:21:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=88807"},"modified":"2025-12-31T14:21:56","modified_gmt":"2025-12-31T14:21:56","slug":"the-madness-of-financial-capitalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2025\/12\/31\/the-madness-of-financial-capitalism\/","title":{"rendered":"The madness of financial capitalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Guardian published this headline<\/a> today:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

It was followed by this crass commentary:<\/p>\n

\n

It was a bumper year for stock markets globally and the surprise, perhaps, is that the FTSE 100 index more than kept up. The London market has sometimes been derided as lacking dynamism \u2013 the hedge fund manager Paul Marshall called it the \u201cJurassic Park\u201d of exchanges<\/a>\u00a0a few years ago \u2013 but its main index enjoyed its best 12 months since 2009. The Footsie didn\u2019t quite make it to the round number of 10,000 but still improved by 21.5%, slightly outperforming the S&P 500 index in the US.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So, it looks like we're going to war, and miners are doing the best to destroy the planet we live on, but what the heck, the FTSE's up 20% or more, and we're all living in a bubble that is bound to burst - so let's get out the Champers and celebrate!<\/p>\n

This, I suggest, is what the madness of financial capitalism, as driven by financialisation and financial engineering, looks like.<\/p>\n

\n

Comments\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

When commenting, please take note of this blog\u2019s comment policy,\u00a0which is available here<\/a>. Contravening this policy will result in comments being deleted before or after initial publication at the editor\u2019s sole discretion and without explanation being required or offered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Guardian published this headline today: It was followed by this crass commentary: It was a bumper year for stock markets globally and the surprise,
 Read the full article…<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[136,14,204,35,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-88807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-city-of-london","category-corruption","category-economic-justice","category-economics","category-ethics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88807"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88819,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88807\/revisions\/88819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}