I am The Markets and I'm sick of people telling me how I feel
People keep saying I'm 'concerned' and 'confused'. It's not like I'm the one to blame for everything going tits up
'I'm not the one who created a whole array of inherently flawed financial instruments that no one properly understood.' Photograph: Andrea Comas/Reuters
Two quotes from yesterday's Guardian got me. "Markets have become increasingly concerned that the austerity programmes in the eurozone are causing a vicious circle of recession", and "Markets were confused by mixed messages from European capitals". I have only one word of reply. Bollocks. Did anyone phone me to ask how I, The Markets, was feeling about these subjects? Did they hell?
So let me get things straight. I am not in the slightest bit concerned about the austerity programmes in the eurozone. I am entirely indifferent to whether Greece and Spain get bailed out, go bankrupt or both. Just as I'm not at all bothered if Germany gets any of its money back.
I existed long before someone invented the eurozone and I will be around long after it has ceased to exist. I'm not in the caring business. I'm a trader. Someone has something they want to sell, someone has something they want to buy. End of. Whether people are flogging something of value or billions of pounds of worthless debt is entirely irrelevant to me. I'm just a mechanism for other people's greed and inefficiency. Neither am I in any way confused. Quite the opposite. I see everything with a steely-eyed clarity. The confusion is all yours.
But while we're on the subject of me, let me tell you how I really am feeling. As you might have gathered, I am pretty damned pissed off. I am sick and tired of everyone making judgments about my emotional state of mind without making any effort to talk to me, think sensibly about me or hack my phone. It's both lazy and insulting, but I've rather got used to it as it goes with the territory. What annoys me most is the way all this talk of me being concerned and confused makes it sounds like I'm implicated in the business of everything going tits up.
I will not be the fall guy. I have done nothing wrong. I am merely the blank canvas for other people's incompetence. I'm not the one who created a whole array of inherently flawed financial instruments that no one properly understood. I'm not the idiot who decided property prices were going to go up for ever and ever and that every country could max out its credit card. I'm not the out-of-my-depth chancellor of the exchequer trying to convince both myself and the country that I have the situation in hand and that I know what I'm doing.
None of that is anything to do with me. If anyone had wanted to set up a more straightforward and fairer market, I would have been OK with that. So, a final word to the wise. Remember who the real culprits are. It's they who are concerned and confused. Though not on your behalf. What they are concerned and confused about is how to get you to pay for the decisions they shouldn't have made in the first place.
As told to John Crace
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