Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

Is Professor Lane not overstating the sovereign states in a sense that Oxfam said that in 2007, at the beginning of the crash, the 80 richest billionaires had $1.5 trillion in the markets at that time. No doubt Professor Lane is familiar with the work of Professor David Harvey, professor of anthropology at the City University of New York. Professor Lane echoes in his opening remarks the words of Professor Harvey who spoke about strange new markets that arose which pioneered with what became know as the shadow banking system, permitting investment in credit swaps, currency derivatives, even future markets, pollution rights and betting on the weather. He states that this massive global funding grew from virtually nothing in 1990 to $250 trillion in 2005, at a time when global output was only $45 trillion. To the year 2008, it grew to an astonishing figure of $600 trillion. Was it inevitable that with funds of that magnitude sloshing around the financial markets, extraordinary speculative developments would manifest themselves as these funds competed for profits?