Devil Take the Hindmost [antikvár]

PREFACE: DEVIL TAKE THE HINDMOST • When I was young, people called me a gambler. As the scale of my operations increased I became known as a speculator. Now I am called a banker. But I have been doing the same thing all the time. Sir Ernest Cassell, banker to Edward VII N'ever before has the subject of speculation attracted as much attention as it does today. Behind much of the contemporary financial and economic news—foreign currency crises, stock market bubbles and crashes, derivatives fiascos, and technological innovations—lurks the speculator. In the United States, milhons of individual investors trade stocks daily. The success of the American economy in the 1990s has largely been the product of speculative funds flowing into the stock market. This has enabled new companies to be floated and old ones to be merged and encouraged corporations to invest and investors to spend some of their stock market gains. A great bubble of prosperity has been blown before our eyes and its stabiUty is natiu-ally a cause for anxious concern. Speculation is a divisive topic. Many pohticians—several of them in Asia—^wam that the global economy is being held hostage by speculators. In their opinion, the speculator is a parasitical figure, driven by greed and fear, who creates and thrives on financial crises: