There are fascinating chunks of history embedded in all this; the gradual, then overwhelming unwinding of government controls of the world financial system being one. The 1944 post-war Breton Woods agreement of fixed exchange rates and the gold standard ended in 1973. This inevitably opened floodgates of speculation and high-risk and ethically dubious investing. For 30 years the price of gold had been pegged at $US35 an ounce (at the time of writing, an ounce of the stuff would set you back $US2,345).
By the 1980s and into the ’90s, laissez-faire economics had given the banks free rein. These were the days of “letting the market decide”, as though “the market” was some kind of sentient being, not the financial version of a mud-wrestling pit that it turned out to be. You might imagine that the GFC would have given bankers and regulators pause for thought, and maybe it did, for a moment or two.
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Yet the gravy train rolls on, and despite Shepherd’s valiant attempt to introduce a fairer system (he saw the Alice financial trading platform as being a transparent and regulated public utility, like the water supply, rather than a financial free-for-all), Kells believes that its next catastrophic derailment can’t be far off.
“With derivatives and other engineered financial products,” he writes, “the mega-banks routinely make huge profits from financial gambles, secure in the knowledge that governments are more likely than not to bail them out – even if the gambles put the whole system at risk.”
This is a complex but important book about patent law, and indeed the very nature of ideas and how we put a value on them. A tangible, monetary value, not on a new and better mousetrap or can opener, but on something as nebulous as an intellectual process.
And on a more personal level, it’s the story of how such an intellectual process, or simply a new way of doing business, can take on a life of its own. “For Ian,” Kells writes, “Alice was tangibly someone in his life. He took her places, introduced her to people, made plans for her future.”
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