The Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles with People and the Planet [Hardcover]

How everything from the price of food to energy and housing costs is fixed by remote, unregulated financial markets, and what can be done about it

The global market in money – housed in the offshore ‘shadow’ banking system – holds $217 trillion in financial assets and operates beyond the reach of any nation’s taxman. Asset managers, private equity firms, and pension and sovereign wealth funds scoop up the world’s savings for investment and manage them as they choose, unaccountable to politicians or the citizens who elect them.

In this brilliant, accessible and incisive introduction to the murky world of glo­balized finance, Ann Pettifor links the activities of remote mobile financial markets to both the cost-of-living and climate crises. In an insane global casino, bankers are gambling with our future. When we foot the bill, no one but a few economists understands what has happened. The result is volatile, unpre­dictable and uncontrollable speculation in global commodities, pension, energy, and housing.

Pettifor argues that societies and gov­ernments can take back control of the global financial system. We have done it before and can do it again. Indeed, it is imperative that we do so if we are to manage the twin threats of climate breakdown and biosphere collapse.1.Introduction
2.Chapter One The origin of today’s ‘revolutionary situation’
3.Chapter Two The Global Casino, Money and Power
4.Chapter Three The Global Casino, Your Pension and Your Home
5.Chapter Four The Global Casino and Your Daily Bread
6.Chapter Five The Global Casino: Playing Poker with the Energy System
7.Chapter Six The Global Casino and Housing
8.Chapter Seven The Global Casino and Climate
9.Chapter Eight The Global Casino needs System ChalÓ