From King William III’s empty coffers in the eighteenth century to David Cameron’s ‘big, open and comprehensive offer’ in the twenty-first, penniless governments have had to go cap in hand to the markets. Stock exchanges have always been on hand to help out, though not at any price, and states have assisted by settling matters of morality and legality in the expanding domain of finance. This episode unpicks the complex relationship between markets and state and wonders whether there’s anything positive for our building project.

Transcription

I first noticed it in May 2010, on the sixth, to be exact.

If you are listening in the UK you might remember 6 May as the day of a general election, the day when Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown was voted out of power. It was not a decisive defeat for Brown, nor a victory for anyone else. David Cameron, as leader of the Conservative party, looked set to form a minority government. Stock markets seesawed with anxiety, posting big losses on the morning after the election. Markets like certainty, the pundits said, so Cameron did something else.

Yes, he made Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrat party a ‘big, open and comprehensive offer’ to share in a coalition government. The rest, as they say, is history and a very distressing one at that. Such moments matter. John Rentoul, writing in the Independent, wonders how things might have gone differently; he sketches out an alternative story where Clegg joins forces with a Labour Party revived by new leadership. ‘If Clegg had made a different choice,’ he writes, ‘we would be living in a different country now: slightly better off, with better public services, and probably still in the EU.[1] I think that’s true. But could Clegg have done so? I’m not sure. My recollection of those moments is the extraordinary prominence given to the sentiments of the financial markets. It seemed that the force driving politicians to set up this bizarre, ideologically incompatible coalition – one that would ultimately destroy the Liberal Democrats as a third party in British politics – was not a concern to properly serve the British electorate and represent its wishes but an overwhelming need to pacify the markets. This was how it was reported during the tense days that followed the election. In the Telegraph, 9 May: ‘The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats last night sought to reassure financial markets that they are close to agreeing an economic deal that would allow David Cameron to take power.’ On 10 May the Financial Times reported that “both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat leaders want to strike a deal as soon as possible to reassure both the public and the financial markets that a stable government can be formed quickly.” It seemed undignified, these leaders scurrying to shake hands to keep the market  happy. Don’t forget, this was not yet two years since the British government had been forced to throw half a billion pounds sterling at the banks to stop them collapsing and taking the infrastructure of global civilisation with them. One might have been forgiven for thinking that financial markets did not know anything about anything, let alone the crucial matters of government…

Hello, and welcome to How to Build a Stock Exchange. My name is Philip Roscoe, and I teach and research at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. I am a sociologist interested in the world of finance and I want to build a stock exchange. Why? Because, when it comes to finance, what we have just isn’t good enough. To build something – to make something better – you need to understand how it works. Sometimes that means taking it to pieces, and that’s exactly what we’ll be doing in this podcast. I’ll be asking: what makes financial markets work? What is in a price, and why does it matter? How did finance become so important? And who invented unicorns? In the last episode, I opened up one of the first key ideas for our building project: that stock exchanges are embedded in history and in the material architectures that make them work. The two are related, of course. We saw how Chicago’s great stockyards led to the birth of a market in financial abstractions, and how that market was shaped by new technology in the form of the tickertape, and by the successive buildings that housed it. But today: how did finance become so important?

You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve got Brexit on my mind. As I sit writing this, it is eight days, seven hours, 40 minutes and 14 seconds to Brexit. In the time it took to type that, it’s dropped to 39 minutes. (Between writing and recording, we seemed to have gained a fortnight). In the first episode of this podcast I argued that financial markets should bear their share of responsibility for populist politics and Brexit. I suggested that markets have been used as a mechanism for squeezing labour to give to capital, through shoddy employment practices and an exclusive focus on the claims of shareholders. But these newspaper commentaries – Cameron and Clegg rushing to placate the angry market – suggest a much more direct link. It came down to money, of course. After the financial crisis, Britain was broke: the only source of money was international borrowing accessed through the bond market. Playing to the market was like sucking up to the bank manager to avoid having your house repossessed. Just as old school bank managers were trained to look out for flashy clothes and extravagant spouses as an indicator of financial intemperance and thus poor credit quality, so the British government was forced to promise a financial parsimony that manifested itself in austerity.[2]

Financial markets shaped the run up to that election, the crucial days afterwards, and a long slog through a cruel and wrongheaded economic policy that has taken us to the brink of political self-annihilation.

I found that countdown timer, in case you are wondering, on a trade-the-markets website – even in adversity there’s opportunity. At least, for some of us.

—– Timer noise[3]

It would seem reasonable to ask, then: how did financial markets get so important? That’s what I’ll be looking at today, and is a second key theme of this podcast – the relationship between markets and states.

We saw last week how the Chicago Board of Trade grew out of agricultural wealth as a political project among the city’s elite. While we might think of stock exchanges as dislocated and global, the truth is quite the reverse. As the statues in the Board of Trade’s old trading room suggested, the interests of politics, state and commerce have always been intertwined in the stock exchange. Take London, for example.

London’s market is much older than that of Chicago. The journalist and historian Elizabeth Hennessy suggests that in January 1698 one John Castaing began publishing a list of commodity and foreign exchange prices, from what he quaintly described as his ‘office at Jonathan’s Coffee House.’[4] Not so different from those techno-start-ups grandly headquartered in the local Starbucks, I suppose.

Jonathan’s Coffee House was located on the city’s Exchange Alley. Garraway’s was another such in the same street. Exchange Alley was a dangerous place, full of pickpockets and unscrupulous brokers as well as honest ones. One took one’s money, and possibly more, in one’s hands when venturing into London’s fledgling stock-market. Stock market traders had been settling themselves in these spaces after spilling out of the Royal Exchange, the City’s new commodities market. They may have been more thrown out than spilled out: they were numerous, noisy and disruptive, and trading in stocks did not have the cache of trade in the more visible commodities of the Exchange. Someone who traded stocks purely for speculation became known as a jobber (a title that lasted until October 1986!), snarkily described by Dr Johnson as “a low wretch who makes money by buying and selling in the funds.” So how did it become respectable?

A great deal happened in a short space of time. According to Ranald Michie, the definitive expert on the history of the London Stock Exchange, there was at the end of the seventeenth century a massive increase in the popularity of tradable stocks. ‘Before 1689,’ he writes, ‘there were only around 15 major joint‐stock companies in Britain, with a capital of £0.9m., and their activities were focused on overseas trade, as with the Hudson’s Bay Company or the Royal African Company. In contrast, by 1695 the number had risen to around 150 with a capital of £4.3m.’ (As always, full references for the sources quoted are in the transcript on the podcast webpage). Twenty five years later, during the boom that became known as the South Sea Bubble, a further 190 entities were proposed, hoping to raise £220 million from overexcited shareholders. That’s a five-fold increase in capital over as many years, and an expected two-hundred and twenty fold increase over three decades.

A joint-stock company, by the way, is simply what we would call a corporation, a legal entity with shares that can be traded independently of the firm. Among the earliest was the now-notorious East India Company, set up by Queen Elizabeth I’s Royal Charter on New Year’s Eve of the year 1600. As Michie points out, the financi