Things I Learned from "Every Man A Speculator", Part I

The author is one Steve Fraser. We have never met, but a few old friends know we share a small bit of history. His book is quite an accomplishment. It’s a cultural history of “Wall Street,” really of the U.S. empire of finance, but it’s also a business history. I’m more than half-way through but I’d rather post my reactions in closer to real time. Hence this post as a first installment.

A few things I didn’t know. One is the degree of centralized direction of capital investment as the 19th Century drew to a close. At the head of this pyramid was J.P. Morgan. The role of the State in the growth American capitalism is typically ignored or discounted. But so too the extent of oligopolistic markets. Trust me, economists have no clue about any of it. Their fantastical theories are innocent of such complexities.

The extent of cartelization dovetailed with thorough penetration of the top echelons of U.S. politics. The U.S. Congress was fully bought and paid for. That is something everybody sort of knows, but not necessarily the centralized organization of the business combine behind the curtain.

A second was how railroads exposed the U.S. farmer to the competitive ravages of the world market in foodstuffs. Between the uncertainties of the weather and the unfathomable complexities of credit, railroad rates, and the doings of other intermediaries, the family farmer didn’t have a chance. Hence the populist revolts that followed, as well as fuel for the progressive, middle-class reformers in the earliest decades of the 20th Century.

Here too, mainstream economics is clueless about the economic fallout from waves of business and farm bankruptcies that characterized the latter decades of the 19th Century. Given the power, I would have half a mind to ban the teaching of economics. Unfortunately, if I hadn’t studied it myself I would have little sense of why its prohibition should be contemplated.

Then there is the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism that infused most attacks on finance. I’ve been mentioning a book I think is important, “Anti-Judaism: the Western Tradition,” which documents the millennial presence of anti-Judaism in Christian and Islamic religious commentary.

With this background, it should not be surprising that the stigmas of usury and Shylock money-lending should be common themes in populist tracts and speeches. What was new to me was the extent to which such tropes were deployed by elite ‘Brahmin’ critics of finance as well, all the way up to President Theodore Roosevelt.

It’s not difficult to find commonalities here to the contemporary Trumpist movement. I’ve resisted analogies of this movement to populism, but the resemblances are hard to miss. Instead of the Rothschilds, today we have Soros. A counterpart to the libertine perversions imagined about Wall Street speculators is today’s fantasy about liberals and pedophilia circulated by Qanon lunatics. It’s hard to separate prejudice and ignorance from mass anti-establishment sentiment.

Regarding Trump, incidentally, a recurring theme in Fraser is the ambivalent attitude of the public towards the ill-gotten gains of speculators. On one hand, speculation is looked down upon as immoral and socially harmful. On the other, everybody would have liked a piece of the action. We can see that today in Trump’s popularity: rich people are off-putting, but like Trump you can be a slob and still get rich, and moreover, as Trump attests by word and deed, there is nothing wrong with that.

More when I finish the book.