sutton038

Globalisation can lead to surreal situations. For example, several weeks ago I got a call from a Kenyan guy called Karim Ajania , who's based in San Francisco, and who runs a website for a Mozambican forestry project called Mezimbite. You'd think the website would be focused on, well, Mozambican forestry, but it features contributions on a variety of topics from some pre-eminent global economists, including Sir Partha Dasgupta and Oxford's Paul Collier . Karim told me that h e'd managed to get respected Harvard professor  and former economic advisor to Bill Clinton,  Jeff Frankel , to write him a short blog on commodity speculation. Karim wanted me to write a reply. Karim had seen a  previous article  I'd written on food speculation , where I'd suggested that excessive involvement of financial players in agricultural futures markets could distort prices of real food, potentially leading to negative impacts on the welfare of the world's most...

Over the last year I've become somewhat intrigued by Glencore and other physical commodity traders. Part of that interest comes from my work on commodity speculation , and the fact that much of the analysis around that issue has focused on investment banks and hedge funds rather than the companies that actually deal in physical  commodities. Part comes from my fascination with figuring out how the global trade system works. Glencore has the added draw of being a notoriously opaque and secretive company, with a controversial and swashbuckling ex-captain who made a name for himself by doing deals that no-one else would do. Trying to figure out how their vast commodity operations work is a detective mystery if ever there was one. In May 2011 they went public and listed on the London Stock Exchange. That means they sold ownership stakes to investors via the UK market. Technically speaking though, they only sold about 12% of the company, and technically speaking, they're not base...

I tried to spend Christmas day at the London Occupy camps, but truth be told, I couldn't stay there long and ended up wondering the City instead. Maybe I was just melancholic at spending another solitary Christmas, but I couldn’t help feeling that the original dynamism of Occupy was lost. I sat on the stairs of St. Paul’s and looked at a tent calling for everyone to become a vegan. There’s something slightly futile about that message. There's also something highly prescriptive about it, allowing little space for those who might sympathise in principle with the broad critique of finance, but who don't feel included in the ragtag countercultural facade. The Occupy movement is showing real signs of losing steam, and part of it is simply down to the fact that, when push comes to shove, it doesn't really offer that much to the everyday person. That’s why I’m so pleased MoveYourMoneyUK  arrived on the scene today. The campaign asks people to withdraw their money from the huge...

Several hundred years back, the City of London was protected by a great stone wall, and access was controlled via several key gates . Aldersgate was in the north, Ludgate was to the west, Aldgate was in the east, and on the south end of London Bridge there was Bridge Gate. Later, others were added, like Bishopsgate, Moorgate, Cripplegate, and Newgate. Nowadays, the physical wall and gates have slipped out of popular memory. To many modern commuters into the City, the Moorgate is nothing but a station on the Northern Line of the London Underground. Recently, a wing of the Occupy movement set up camp just up the road from Moorgate, in Finsbury Square. Another wing set up in an old building in Sun Street . Like the original St. Paul’s Camp, the new camps seem  like incongruous outposts amidst the black sheet glass and metal frames of buildings housing financial giants. The protesters have managed to take temporary control of small areas of physical space, and yet, do they really hav...

COMING TO A CINEMA NEAR YOU Last week I got published in The Ecologist. The article was called A four-step guide to bypassing high street banks . This is my second article for the magazine (my first was on food speculation ), and this time the aim was to sketch out how people might engage in financial protest, not by waving placards, but by changing debit cards. Many people agree in principle that major high-street banks have too much power, and that they frequently abuse that power. Nevertheless, many individuals don't necessarily have the time, or inclination, to protest about it directly in the manner of the Occupy protesters. There's been a lot of discussion about how to make financial protest more inclusive (including this piece by Kenth Gustaffson on a type of ‘ virtual occupy movement ’), but perhaps one of the most profound (and often overlooked) forms of protest is to distance yourself from mainstream finance by withdrawing deposits and avoiding using the services. The...

London banks were on high alert last week as Max Keiser – the dark lord of financial hellraising – arrived in London to do what he does best: Sacrifice the sacred cows of finance orthodoxy. It’s fitting that he chose to do so in a pub down an alley in London Bridge – The south bank has long been a place of covert speakeasies where villains, pirates and heretics might slag off the king and preach rebellion among the drunken rabble. The event was a fundraiser in aid of   Resonance FM , London's alternative arts radio station.  Needless to say, it was awesome, and yes, I was drunken rabble. DARK LORD RAP: MAX RAGES AGAINST THE MACHINE Max Keiser is in intriguing guy. I don’t claim to know his background in any depth, but the quoted back story says he was 1) initially a stockbroker, 2) then an entrepreneur that started the Hollywood Stock Exchange , (a platform for buying and selling film rights, later sold to the huge brokerage Cantor Fitzgerald) and 3) an entertainer that ...

It’s a pleasure to announce that I will be syndicating out blog-posts to the website of the great new London-focused magazine CurioCity . CurioCity was started by Matthew Lloyd and Henry Elliot in early 2010, originally as an informal handmade pamphlet to distribute to friends and family. Back then, a group of us wrote articles and put together the first issue in Henry’s lounge in Kennington. It’s come a long way since then, and the first professionally printed version is now being stocked in iconic London outlets such as Foyles and Rough Trade . The website has now been set up to provide a regular flow of high quality pieces centered on London, suggesting ideas for experiences that are fun, educational, and that encourage a deeper engagement with the city. Urban adventures in financial landscapes My main focus is going to be ‘ Financial Psychogeography ’. ‘ Psychogeography ’ is a word that means different things to different people, but I’m taking it to refer to: the exploration of c...