He couldn’t even use the “I didn’t realise the microphone was still on” defence. He was, after all, sitting in front of a television camera.
Alessio Rastani is not a particularly important or influential trader. But he is, it appears, an honest one. When interviewed on BBC News 24 he said that traders were indifferent to the success of any Euro rescue package up. They are interested in making money. They don’t really care how.
I suppose you have make allowances for the fact he was showing off a bit, the (barely) grown-up equivalent of the toddler who says ‘Poo!!!’ a lot in public and thinks it clever. Thus: “If I see an opportunity to make money, I go for that.” Or, again: “Governments don’t rule the world. Goldman Sachs rules the world.”
Nevertheless, allowances made, his statement that he had been hoping for a recession for three years because crashes left rich pickings for savvy traders was properly jaw dropping. “I go to bed every night [and] I dream of a recession,” he “confessed”. So candid was he that there were rumours he must be a hoax; apparently not.
Is Mr Rastani is right? Presumably he is telling the truth about his dreams. He would need to be inflammatory to the point of imbecility to make up such a confession on television.
But is he right about the immorality – we have moved passed amorality here – of city trading. The BBC’s Robert Peston seemed to think so, as he tweeted: “A must watch if you want to understand the euro crisis and how markets work,” on Tuesday.
If he is right, how have we got to this?
It is probably worth noting that what Mr Rastani described is not unique to our times. Profiteering, racketeering, price fixing, coin clipping: the history of financial manipulation and corruption is, well, as old as history.
“[Use] accurate and honest weights and measures”, the Torah enjoins the Israelites, one way or another, in three occasions – presumably because they hadn’t or weren’t. Mr Rastani’s tactics are essentially no different: making a profit by exploiting other people and paying no regard to their good. Anyone who expects to make this kind corruption history, to coin a phrase, is going to be disappointed.
The difference in this case is that what Mr Rastani described is not an action but an industry. Thousands of people make billions of pounds by ‘transactions’ that have floated free of morality, indeed floated free of any meaningful market itself. It matters little whether a crash decimates the number or value of market interactions in or across societies. There is still money to be made.
Ed Milliband had it just about right when he talked about a “something for nothing culture.” But the key word there is culture, ‘the way we do things round here’.
As with the other crises that have elbowed their way into public conscience over recent years – parliamentary expenses, media phone backing, police co-option, smash-and-grab riots – the problem is less about how we can legislate such activity out of existence, as why is it that so many people seem to be willing to engage in such transparently immoral activity.
Sin is not a popular word today, so the concept of cultural sin is unlikely to catch on. But just as Roman Catholic theology speaks sometimes of ‘structural sin’, wrongdoing that is cemented into the structures of society by legislation, perhaps there is such a thing as cultural sin, which, like the current of a river, carries with it those with no strength or desire, to swim against the flow.
Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos
