Fast money

Today global financial flows dwarf world trade in traditional job - creating commerce and industry (like producing cars or soap) by about twenty to one. The amount of money that moves through computers and along elaborate undersea cable wire or is beamed off satellites on a single weekday is more than three times what Japan earns through trade in a whole year. Currency speculation sets off rapid changes of value in the foreign - exchange charts. One effect is to undermine even the modest attempts by economic planners or political reformers in the Third World. What were affordable machinery parts yesterday become out - of - reach luxuries today. Currency, bond and stock markets are complex and require an insider's knowledge. Once inside, the financial investor can derive huge returns. But as in most games for each winner there have to be losers: these mighty markets destroy as much as they create. This is the heartless world of ruthless takeovers, currency manipulations and leveraged buy - outs made infamous in Oliver Stone's movie Wall Street with its biting critique of the acquisitive spirit of the 1980s. In the South the ubiquitous structural - adjustment policies of the IMF and the World Bank are designed with this tale in mind. Back in the hothouse days of Jamaican politics in the early 1970s, Michael Manley rose to power and tried to institute nationalist policies. His popular program included plans for more housing and welfare spending. But this was not to be. The Jamaican dollar plummeted. Foreign companies packed their bags. And the international banks shut off the credit tap. By the late 1970s, the IMF was in a position to 'reorient' the Jamaican economy. Since that time Jamaica, even under Manley himself, has been less partial to policies which would upset Wall Street and the City of London. There are a host of Jamaican - type stories in the Third World. The US ended up with all the trumps: not only an effective veto on the policies and programs of the newly created IMF and World Bank but also the US dollar positioned as the only effective medium of international exchange. All other currencies were tied to the dollar through the gold standard, which fixed gold's value in dollar terms. With these arrangements in place massive devaluations of other countries' currencies became inevitable (25 devalued in 1949) and the world financial centre shifted from the the City of London to New York. Under the Marshall Plan the economies of post - war Europe we