Martin Vander Weyer

Philip Augar has found a snappy title for this forensic examination of the sins of the investment banking fraternity, and a startling figure: $180 billion. That is the amount he reckons the big hitters of Wall Street and the City harvested in the 1980s and ’90s in the form of excessive profits for their firms and excessive remuneration for themselves. They did not make this fortune as more admirable entrepreneurs do, by creating value that would not otherwise have existed or providing goods and services that improved their customers’ lives. They did it by skimming fees and commissions and trading profits out of corporate clients, retirement funds and individual investors like you and me, and very often by bending rules or simply breaking them.

Recent research tells us that the average British shopper is destined to spend two years of his or her life inside a supermarket. Ever since ‘Mr Alan’ Sainsbury, third-generation head of the grocery dynasty, converted his Croydon branch to self-service in 1950 — and despite the fact that one of the first customers threw her wire basket at him in disgust — these cathedrals to consumer choice and convenience have loomed larger and larger in the national landscape. They have hollowed out our town centres and surrounded them with graceless hangars in giant car parks. They have become an irresistible force in the economics of farming. They have broadened our eating habits and destroyed our cooking skills.

As in warfare and international relations, the Brits punch above their weight in the debate about globalisation and the onward march of the transnational market economy. The Guardian columnist George Monbiot, in The Age of Consent (Flamingo 2003), was the first anti-globalisation campaigner to offer a coherent manifesto for a movement which until then had tried to make a virtue of all-embracing incoherence. John Kay of Oxford and the LSE, in The Truth about Markets (Penguin/Allen Lane 2003), offered a brilliant analysis of why rampant capitalism does not need to be replaced — as anti-globalisers’ placards proclaimed at Seattle — by ‘something nicer’, but why it only delivers widespread benefits where it flourishes in well-ordered civic societies.

An awful lot has happened since the Canadian journalist Naomi Klein shot to radical prominence with the publication of No Logo, the first sacred text of the anti-globalisation movement, shortly after her co-religionists besieged the 1999 world trade talks in Seattle. They went on to wreck the World Bank/IMF meeting in Prague and, less successfully, to try to disrupt the G7 Genoa summit in July 2001, though we now know that the extraordinarily heavy security which thwarted them at Genoa was primarily designed to ward off murderous Al-Qaeda terrorists, rather than paint-spraying, slogan-chanting anti-globalisers.