A market, children learn, is where one goes to buy a fat pig. Grownups call it pork belly, but rarely come home with the bacon. Instead, they hold a slip of computer-generated paper that represents a bet on the future price of the commodity. Not having to handle the meat makes it much easier for traders. They have time to think up creative ways of profitably shuffling their paper ^ or, as the case is today, manipulating numbers on a computer. The game can now be as bewildering as three-dimensional chess played internationally at the speed of light.
This makes the...
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