Mad game waiting for a touch of humane rationality

The other day I entered the belly of the beast, or to be more prosaic about it, the New York trading floors of one the big Wall Street investment bankers, Salomon Brothers.

Such places are the inner sanctums of today's sacred mysteries, where the priests and acolytes of Mammon work the rituals of futures and options, bonds and equities, securities and margins, mutual funds and price/earning ratios. Most of us know our lives are shaped in important respects by what happens on these floors, but few of us have a clue what it is.

Looking at it with your own eyes doesn't help much. It has, at one level, a kind of glamour. There is something awesome about these huge banks of screens and phones and electronic circuitry suspended in mid-air far above the streets of the city.

The trading floor has an atmosphere that must be like that of a NASA control room, as if these people were with the sheer force of their concentration keeping distant satellites afloat or calibrating the most precise movements on a robot on Mars. And in a sense they are. Their thoughts are echoing almost instantly around the world, affecting the well-being of millions. The supercharged rocket of global capitalism takes its bearings from their rapid responses.

But at a second glance, the place also has the sealed-off feeling of a sports stadium. There is an enthralling game being played out every day here, and these are the players. The world has shrunk to the narrowest, most abstract dimensions.

Tom Wolfe, in The Bonfire of the Vanities, captures the feeling of walking into one of these trading rooms very well: "As soon as he entered the bond trading room, and the glare from the plate glass hit him and the roar of a legion of young men crazed by greed and ambition engulfed him, everything else in his life fell away and the world became the little green symbols that slid across the black screens of the computer terminals."

Caught up in the frantic, all-absorbing logic of this strange sport, there is no possibility of contemplating consequences. A game, in the end, is its own point, and this game is no exception. And what a bizarre sport it really is. In it, the future is already the past. Share prices are based on expectations about future profits and dividends. What you pay now for a share is what the market thinks it is likely to be worth in the future.

And in this world, too, what matters is not what you think but what you think other people will think. John Maynard Keynes memorably compared the stock market to "those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so each competitor has to pick not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view."

Now and then, the intellectual cheerleaders of Wall Street try to argue that the game is, albeit unintentionally, a moral mission. It creates, they say, new wealth and new opportunities. But the truth is that the main effect of the huge expansion of the financial markets over the last 20 years has been to make the rich richer.

In the Reagan years, employment on Wall Street doubled to an astonishing total of 364,000. There are now more Americans employed on Wall Street than in the entire steel industry. But 60 per cent of the new wealth created in the US went to the richest 1 per cent of the population and 99 per cent to the top 20 per cent. From 1979 to 1993, the real family income of the poorest 20 per cent of American families fell by 15 per cent. The US is now the most economically unequal country in the industrialised world. (Ireland, by the way, is the second most unequal.)

In fact, the reason for the huge growth in Wall Street is not that it has led to great economic or social advances. It is simply that, as Bill Clinton's former labour secretary Robert Reich puts it, the supply of financial wizards generates its own demand: "The escalation is boundless. . . Financial ploys become more complex; the computers and software in trading rooms, more powerful and expensive.

"Clients, meanwhile, feel compelled to spend ever more in order to gain a bit of ground, or at least to avoid costly defeat . . . Those who facilitate these transactions defy the law of supply and demand: the greater their supply, the greater the demand for their services."

The great thing about working on Wall Street is making a lot of money doing terrible damage to productive industry, and then making lots more cleaning up the mess. In the early 1990s, the US economy suffered the consequences of the 1980s financial madness - junk bonds, leveraged buyouts, asset-stripping - and the financial wizards could no longer make their fortunes by doing these kinds of deals. Instead, they made equally large fortunes dealing with the bankruptcies and restructuring debts.

And, of course, much of the manic energy expended by the financial wizards is pointless even its own terms. Since 1990 the Wall Street Journal has regularly carried out tests, comparing the performances of shares chosen by professional market analysts with those chosen by throwing darts at lists of quoted companies. The professionals have done somewhat better than the darts (though not by much) but they owe their lead to two factors.

One is that they pick riskier, higher-yielding shares, which many investors would not want. And then their predictions are, in the short term, self-fulfilling. The share prices rise because they have been backed by reputable analysts. When these two factors are taken into account, the darts are just as good as the analysts.

And Wall Street is coming to acknowledge it. Bit by bit, the traders and arbitragers, the dealers and brokers are being replaced by machines. Even now, an increasing number of financial market transactions are being conducted by one computer talking to another.

The computers are less excitable: they absorb information more quickly, they can be programmed to minimise risks. And when it comes to moral sensibilities, to considering consequences or wondering what it's all for, they may be no more sensitive than the human beings but neither are they any less so.

Maybe soon, when financial markets are contained almost entirely within the secure circuitry of electronic traders, Wall Street and its satellites around the world will lose their mystifying glamour. Maybe governments around the world will start thinking about how some kind of humane rationality can be imposed on this mad game.

Fintan O'Toole is temporarily based in New York