The Trading Game: A Confession 

That’s finance. The total value of all the economic activity in the world is estimated at $105 trillion. That’s the mangoes. 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.

The Trading Game is an account of what goes on inside those banks when they are at the work of ‘finance’, meaning gambling. It is a shocking but not surprising book, because Gary Stevenson’s account is essentially identical to the one critical outsiders gave of the banking system in the wake of the global financial crisis. It is especially shocking since much of Stevenson’s story is not set during the run-up to the crash, but in the aftermath – when lessons had allegedly been learned and behaviour reformed. It is clear from his book that those of us who talked about privatised gains and socialised losses were, not to put a finer point on it, completely right.