By Bron Suchecki, on February 10th, 2012
Below are some relevant extracts from Martin Armstrong’s The Analytical Shill. The article is generally about how research and analysts are conflicted and how analysts and investors and gurus can be blinded by their biases. The paragraphs below are straight from the article and will jump around a bit because I’ve just pasted them in order they appeared without all the extraneous stuff.
Martin Armstrong:
The metals were one favorite sector where they were constantly bullish – never bearish for 19 years. But hey, the market manipulators always needed cheer-leaders to get people to buy every high so they could sell.
On the Buffett Silver Manipulation, it was PhiBro who had a shill call the Wall Street Journal and tell them I was trying to manipulate silver down because I was short. When the WSJ & I argued and they refused to print the name Buffett they demanded I give them, that forced the CFTC to act calling me to ask where was it taking place. I told them London and they called the Bank of England. When they in turn ordered all silver brokers to show up the next morning, Buffett was forced to come out and admit he bought $1 billion worth of silver but denied he was manipulating the price.
You can ask the guys at GATA. They were well aware of the first 1993 Manipulation by PhiBro (Philips Brothers). They got in bed with Buffett when he stepped in to run Salomon Brothers after they got caught MANIPULATING the US Government bond auctions. They began buying silver and the CFTC stepped in demanding to know who their client was. Now if it had been anyone else, PhiBro’s reply was they refused to tell the name of the client. Forget the law. That does not apply to New York firms. The CFTC responded saying if they could not know who their client was, then PhilBro had to exist the trade. They did and of course made a fortune for the hawkers had all the little guys buy silver just in time for PhilBro to sell it to them.
This is WHY the manipulations began to move to London. Not only did PhiBro try to get me on board, their broker walked across the floor and SHOWED my broker Buffett’s orders at the low!
To create the fundamental, they moved inventory from New York to London. They were manipulating silver as always. Playing games with the inventories. They were moving silver from New York to London where the Buffett orders were being executed. This made the US warehouse inventories drop sharply. Go look at the analysts who talked silver up on that very fundamental. If they said there was a shortage of silver and you better buy it is going to $100, then you may be dealing with a shill or a biased analyst.
Many of the metals analysts with an agenda back then hated my guts. How dare I say there was a manipulation when it was at last silver was going up instead of down. Now I was part of some covert conspiracy hell bent on suppressing the metals because I dared to say “they are back” (manipulators) and the target was $7 by January 1998. To this crowd, a manipulation is always to the downside and never up.
Go check the recommendations of analysts back then. See where they stood. The best one I heard was silver was in demand in London because it was .9999 there instead of .999 in New York.
GATA began to see the same nonsense that I did during the early 1990s. It was just that I saw the manipulations as being UNBIASED. In other words, they did not care what they manipulated as long as there was a guaranteed profit. They manipulated even base metals such as rhodium. They manipulated platinum in league with Russian politicians who strangely recalled all platinum to take an inventory. Hell, Ford Motor Company filed suit over that manipulation.
How do you distinguish a REAL bull market from a bullshit manipulation?
Most manipulations can be seen easily when you look at a market in terms of a Basket of Currencies. Why? Because a REAL bull market must take place ONLY when it rises in terms of ALL currencies. Unless that takes place, investors in some countries will be sellers while others are buyers. Here is a classic example as to why we were bearish on gold for 19 years despite the hate mail and the best attacks of the shills. The manipulators ALWAYS need to get the metals guys worked up into a fever to sell to them to make their profits and big bonuses.
So when analysts only espouse one side, be very careful. For no matter what the market, there is always a time to rally and a time to pause. Nothing is ever straight up or straight down. Anyone who portrays that is either ignorant of the market behavior, or a shill – paid cheer-leader. Putting out bogus research has been the name of the game. Unfortunately, there are just some people who are hardcore.
Markets are the same mix as politics. There are people who simply believe in a given position and no matter what you say or what evidence you present to the contrary, they will never believe it. Thus, I have NEVER been interested in preaching to the choir. I have always preferred the independent thinker – the investor who wants to really learn about market behavior and not read someone who simply supports their never changing view of the world. Nor am I interested in exchange words with those who may not be shills, but are just part of a particular hardcore group. I am cheered only when I agree, and if I disagree, I am despised. But that is expected in the retail world – NEVER in the professional institutional world.
There cannot be a perpetual bull market in anything anymore than you can stand there with your arm straight up in the air. Oh shore, you can do it briefly. But then your arm will feel so heavy you can no longer keep it up. Everything takes a pause for the same reason you sleep at night. Nothing can maintain the same energy output all the time. People come up with all sorts of excuses why they are right yet the market declines. Usually it is some conspiracy of a mythical group so powerful that they just win.
Markets collapse because EVERYONE who ever thought of buying has bought. They are now counting their profits for the next eternity. Something happens and scares the herd. Suddenly, the long try to sell but there is no bid. The market collapses in the blink of an eye. Why, because the majority has already bought and there are no new buyers to keep the momentum going. It is never some mythical short player preventing the upward advance. It is just not time yet.
Philip Tetlock, a professor of organizational behavior at the Haas Business School at the University of California-Berkeley, has been following the so called experts for some 25 years studying primarily the institutional forecasting skill of political experts. He had signed up nearly 300 academics, economists, policymakers and journalists keeping track of more than 82,000 forecasts plotting them against real-world results. He analyzed not just what the experts said but how they reasoned and how quickly they changed their mind in the face of contrary evidence. He also tracked how they reacted when they were wrong, which was of course the majority of the time. Most could not even beat a random forecast generator.
Tetlock’s research did discover that there was one kind of expert turns out consistently more accurate forecasts than others. The most important factor he discovered was not how much education or experience the experts had but how they actually thought. The best forecasters were those who were self-critical, eclectic thinkers who were constantly updating their beliefs when faced with contrary evidence instead of clinging to dogma. He found the best were suspicious of grand schemes and conspiracies and were more practical about their predictive ability. The less successful forecasters clung to the same ideas never wavering pushing the same idea to the breaking point of absurdity. These types of people were more often embraced by the media because they loved to articulate and persuade as to why their idea explained absolutely everything.
Tetlock uncovered widespread forecasting failures. Of course, there is the herd of followers who for some reason want a GURU and unrealistically expect infallibility. This may reinforce the pundits that like to put on a show and claim why they are personally better than everyone else and only their ideas are correct and when wrong, it is the result of some giant conspiracy, not their lack of ability to forecast.
The key to the future lies in the UNBIASED view of whatever it is. You cannot be married to a single position EVER! Tetlock points out that a successful analyst always qualifies their arguments with “however” and “perhaps,” while the dangerous analysts build up momentum with “moreover” and “all the more so” as they try to be more entertaining. The dangerous analyst wants to keep the clients happy and to a large extent preaches to the choir telling them what they want to hear.
The one thing about markets is that the MAJORITY just have to be wrong! Why? They are the fuel that drives the market up and down. Trap the majority either long or short and you create the fuel for the next move in the opposite direction.
So for now, it is far better to let the markets speak. As I stated at just about every conference I have ever given, there is ONLY one analyst that is never wrong – that is the market itself. The key to successful trading & forecasting is to learn how to let the market speak to you and go with the flow. It does so in both TIME as well as PRICE. Turning points are NEVER specific events, but inflection points where highs and lows take place. It would have been nice to have a low first and a more orderly advance afterwards. But markets like to create the worst of all worlds.
So for anyone who thinks he can beat the game as an analyst or trader, must remember one thing. The market is always right. To survive, we have to align ourselves with the market and listen when it speaks. This is not a game for arrogance and prognostications fixed in stone steeped in bias and dogma. History repeats – but also with a slight twist. So how high will gold go? It is a question of CONFIDENCE.
You will ALWAYS be your greatest adversary, for to succeed you must conquer your own biases, fears, and doubts. You cannot do that as Philip Tetlock has keenly demonstrated with fixed ideas. If you are married to a philosophy and will not yield and blame everyone else for conspiring against you and that is the reason something has not yet unfolded, you better see a shrink.
By Bron Suchecki, on January 27th, 2012
Worth reading this response by Victor the Cleaner in FOFOA comments to this question: “At the moment, in order to influence the Gold price downwards, all that needs to be done by the authorities in LBMA and COMEX, is to raise the margin requirements.” This is complete and utter nonsense.
LBMA is a trade association and not an exchange and as such does not set any ‘margin requirement’. The LBMA member firms are typically those banks and other financial institutions that trade gold and silver OTC in London, but non-members around the world also trade OTC with these institutions.
When Newmont has some trucks on the road on the way to the refiner, they might want to sell that gold immediately to eliminate any further price volatility from their accounts, and so they might phone JPM and sell that stuff forward. None of the two counterparties is a speculator here. Newmont does have the real stuff, and JPM does have the cash. So even if they would require collateral, this would not influence the price.
Yes, there are probably some raw recruits who follow websites such as TF and who trade COMEX futures in under-capitalized accounts. Yes, CME occasionally raises the margin. Yes, they may just be checking who is the under-capitalized novice and who really has the cash in order to purchase the gold for the contracts they hold. Yes, they may just rip off the clueless novice for fun (and money). But to think this would set the spot price of gold is quite a hubris.
The OTC market is ten times bigger than COMEX, and so it pushes COMEX around in a way that most COMEX-fixated goldbugs don’t understand.
If you want to keep gold cheap in the long run, you need to create a huge volume of gold loans, expand the ‘money supply’. If you want to manage the price of gold intra-day (and yes, there is indeed statistical evidence for this), you need to sell a lot of gold at spot in a short period of time. But you can do this only if you are a credible financial institution and only as long as you can hand over the allocated whenever your counterparties request it. So you need to understand extremely well what you are doing and how much physical per paper you need to be able to show. Hiking the COMEX margin is a side show.
What I find rather disappointing is the extremely poor quality of the discussion that is presented on the typical precious metal websites. This is financial product pushing of the same quality as pre-1999 when they IPO’d the companies that sell dog-food online.
Here are FOFOA, people discuss a very good reason for owning gold. For some reason, the mainstream goldbug websites totally ignore the good reason and push gold with inconsistent nonsense instead.
Why is that? Want to scalp PSLV? Want to create a mania, sell them financial products (including GoldMoney which is no longer ‘money’ by the way) and then when the big blackout comes, grab the gold for cheap from those who sell in panic because they never understood why they owned it in the first place? Very sad. And when the Financial Times calls the goldbugs confused idiots, sadly, there is even some truth in this statement.
If Victor keeps this up I’ll be out of a blogging job.
By Bron Suchecki, on October 31st, 2011
Shall we count how many bloggers pick up on this news item Chinese silver imports decline 39% y/y; exports tumble 44% y/y:
Silver imports in China fell by 39% y/y and 16% m/m to 264.7 tonnes, the lowest level since February, while silver exports declined by 44% y/y to 83.5 tonnes, keeping China a net importer of the metal for two consecutive years on a monthly basis.
On a product basis, silver powder, unwrought silver, semi-manufactured silver, and silver jewelery all declined y/y in September with the latter two products suffering the steepest decline and silver powder only falling by 4% y/y. Indeed, silver powder is the only product that has grown for the year-to-date.
And from the “Chinese love paper more than physical” department, see China’s gold frenzy gives birth to small bourses:
The emerging exchanges offer a lot size as small as one ounce, which lowers the capital needed to begin trading, even though the margin requirements can be as high as 30 percent. With lot size set at 10 ounces and margins at 20 percent, the initial capital requirement to start trading is about half the amount required by the SGE.
Emerging exchanges claim to trade physical gold, but most investors are not interested in taking physical delivery. Some exchanges make it difficult and expensive to take delivery. …
“Who would want to take physical gold? People just want to speculate on price moves and make a profit,” said a customer service representative at the exchange who gave her last name as Chen.
Analysts compared the gold investment spree to the wave of retail stock market investors in the last decade, who rushed to a bull market with little know-how, only to suffer huge losses during later market turbulence. …
Although China’s central government has vowed to open up the market, and has made progress by allowing more foreign banks access to the two Shanghai exchanges, an open market for retail investors is yet to take shape. …
But it was unlikely to happen as long as the country’s foreign currency exchange remains tightly controlled. Until foreign exchange controls are lifted, Chinese gold bugs would continue to need tables to put down their bets. “The Chinese love gambling,” said Hou.
Doesn’t sound like China’s exchanges are any different from COMEX. If the Chinese Government wanted its people to buy physical gold you’d think all this paper gold would be shut down. I suppose we will have to wait until the much hyped PAGE is up and running [sarcasm]. 
By Simon Grey, on October 11th, 2011
The other day, my brother emailed me to ask if it was wrong to play the stock market. Since I was going to take the time to write him, I thought I’d share my response on my blog.
In the first place, it’s important to note that the stock market is inherently neutral, morally. By this I mean that the stock market, as a non-human entity, cannot go to heaven or hell and, as such, cannot be inherently moral or immoral by its own state of nature.
In the second place, it’s important to note the sources of immorality within the stock market. Karl Denninger has documented massive amounts of fraud among traders, particularly among firms that engage in automated trades. Furthermore, many companies traded on the stock exchange engage in illegal and immoral business practices. Many trades are based on fraud (think of businesses that lie about their balance sheets and income statements). Also, many people engaging stock trades are highly immoral.
Does this then mean that one can never trade stocks? Of course not. If it were immoral to trade with those who are immoral, then no one could buy groceries or clothes, or engage in any kind of trade. And it is not inherently immoral to be the victim of fraud (though it is foolish). Interacting with those who are immoral does not cause their immorality to transfer to you by the merits of trade.
However, those who are immoral can end up having an influence simply by the virtue of your continued interaction with them. This does not mean that the venue of your interaction is immoral. Rather, your decision to allow those who are immoral to drag you down to their level is immoral, and it is you who will bear the guilt and blame for that decision, not the stock market.
It is worth noting, though, that if playing the stock market troubles your conscience then you should refrain from playing the stock market (cf. Romans 14). And it is also worth noting that there are many major players in the stock market who are simply looking for a sucker of which to take advantage, and that the government has often turned a blind eye to the fraud that usually accompanies this. As such, though it is perfectly moral to play the market, it is at this point in time quite foolish to do so.
By Claus Vistesen, on September 6th, 2011
The cage fight between the SNB and FX speculators continue with the most recent round seeing the SNB coming out fists flying aiming for a knock-out.
Quote Bloomberg
The Swiss central bank said it’s setting a minimum franc exchange against the euro and will defend the target with the “utmost determination” if needed.The Swiss National Bank is “aiming for a substantial and sustained weakening of the franc,” the Zurich-based bank said in an e-mailed statement today. “With immediate effect, it will no longer tolerate a euro-franc exchange rate below the minimum rate of 1.20 francs” and “is prepared to buy foreign currency in unlimited quantities.”
And the result, cold steel for the long swissies.
For now …
By B.P.T., on August 30th, 2011
With so much volatility in the stock market recently, choosing which firm you use to invest is a more important decision than ever, due to the major differences in trade execution, quality of support, services offered, and costs associated with trading and maintaining the account. It’s very important to analyze your personal needs and compare them to the options available before making your choice.
Trade execution is especially important if you are a frequent trader or scalper that looks to move in and out of positions rapidly, because any delays in transmitting your order to the exchange could cause you to miss out on your expected price, but should be a consideration of any investor. Many retail brokerages do not focus on this aspect of trading because most of their customers do not place trades often or rely on small price changes to make a profit on a trade, but there are brokerages known for their execution speed, and it is important to understand how your trades are routed between exchanges, dark pools, and other markets to make sure you are getting the best price possible.
Customer support is an aspect of investing that is often overlooked, but can save you large sums of money if you need them. Whether there was a problem with transferring money in or out of your brokerage account, the execution of a trade, or access to your account, prompt, helpful customer support can be the difference between profit and loss in certain situations.
Another factor when choosing an online broker is the number of services offered. It can be very convenient to find a broker that offers the ability to trade multiple financial instruments from a single account, rather than having to manage separate accounts for equities, options, bonds, ETFs, and currencies. Also, many brokerages are offering banking services, which can make managing your money even easier. The final service to consider is the options available for accessing your account. A mobile application or mobile-friendly website can allow you to easily trade from anywhere, and could be a big benefit in certain situations.
Last but not least, the cost of the account must be considered. Most people focus on the cost of trades when choosing an account, but it is important to determine the total cost of the account for you. Infrequent traders might be better off paying a higher fee per trade in exchange for lower account fees, frequent traders might focus only on their cost per trade, and traders with large sums of money might be most concerned with finding the best interest rate available.
In summary, you are the only person who can decide which brokerage is the best for your financial future. Be sure to do some research, discuss the options with other investors, and then choose wisely, since you are using them as an aid toward improving your financial future. If you’d like to do some further research, the SEC has some good advice.
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By Simon Grey, on July 19th, 2011
ASI:
One example he used was of Jonathan’s Coffeehouse, a private club that preceded the London Stock Exchange. In the 18th century, the government refused to enforce stock exchange contracts, seeing them as a form of gambling. Nevertheless, the Coffeehouse became a centre of commerce and contracts were usually upheld voluntarily. If you were a trader, you could rip somebody off once, but would be barred from the club. For people whose livelihoods were based on stock trading, it wasn’t worth it.
The same phenomenon exists today in a whole range of exchanges. When I go to a restaurant and get a bland meal, it’s practically certain that I won’t sue. Does this mean that profit-maximising restaurants will constantly give out bland meals? No – if it serves bad food, I’ll stop going and tell my friends not to go either. Reputational capital, so to speak, is enormously valuable, and losing it can be worse than just losing a court case. As a side-point, the reason that restaurants in touristy areas are usually so bad is down to this fact as well. Tourists typically don’t know anything about the restaurants they go to – could things like TripAdvisor bring an end to tasteless, expensive tourist food?
One complaint about the unfettered free market is that there is no way to “make sure” that people behave ethically and fairly in their business dealings. The unspoken assumption is that only government can provide the final guarantee against fraud, presumably through the use of force. What’s neglected in this fairly shallow analysis is that most people expect to participate in the market over the long term, the market can exert plenty of force, and the government is far from perfect anyway.
Since most people expect to participate in the market over the long term, it would be foolish for them to do things that would cause consumers to distrust them. As was already noted, if someone were to even sell a shoddy product, they would presumably suffer negative consequences. And if they intentionally defrauded customers, they would find that they would go out of business quite quickly.
The reason for this is due to the effect of social pressure, which exists outside of the state. Most people with decent faculties will find that it is in their best interest to “play by the rules” because doing so ensures that will have social acceptance, which in turn ensures that there is some degree of implicit trust which then enables trade. This social pressure ensures that most people conform to social norms, and this is itself a form of force.
Unlike the state, though, the market does not have coercive power, in the sense that conformity can be forced. Anyone can opt out of the society in which they live, if they so choose. Incidentally, if one were to opt out of a given society, the market in that society would improve because those who opted out would no longer participate in that market.
Finally, the coercive force of the government is not always used for good. Even if the market cannot ensure that no one ever gets hurt when engaging in market transactions, it does not follow that the government will. As such, the argument that the government needs to regulate the market for the good of consumers is simply specious.
By Bron Suchecki, on July 19th, 2011
I recently listened to an interview between Eric Sprott and Chris Martenson. Eric has a very good line in spin playing to the themes beloved by the ‘bugs. Deconstructing them requires more time than I have at the moment, but this comment I can’t leave:
“… I think all the paper markets are a joke. As you are probably aware, we trade a billion ounces of silver a day. A billion ounces. The world produces 900 million a year.”
There are many falsehoods in the precious metal commentary “market” but I’m surprised Eric is supporting the idea that large turnover figures are suspicious, which I debunked in this post. He should be careful supporting this meme as it can just as easily apply to his own funds, particularly his silver fund as he seems not interested in doing any secondaries (in contrast to his gold fund).
The suspicious turnover meme is often confused with fractional bullion banking, an example being this comment by The Burning Platform:
“Several competent analysts have worked the numbers (including Bill Murphy and Chris Powell of GATA), and have come to the conclusion that for every ounce of silver in known inventories there are approximately 100 paper contracts trading (a fractional bullion system, if you will) on various exchanges across the globe.”
My response below:
1) My understanding is that the 100:1 figure did not come from “analysis” but from a statement made by CPM Group’s Mr Christian. See here. I would be very interested in independent analysis coming to the 100:1 figure that did not rely on Mr Christian’s comment, please provide links.
2) Mr Christian’s comments were confused by many as a statement about the ratio of fractional bullion banking instead of paper to physical trading ratio, which are two completely different things. GATA’s Adrian Douglas did an analysis that concluded the fractional ratio was 4:1. That analysis had serious flaws in my opinion (see here but in the end it was too conservative, with Mr Christian confirming it is generally 10:1 (40:1 in the case of AIG). 
By Bron Suchecki, on May 26th, 2011
I left this comment on the FOFOA blog:
Your point about bullion banks having the best intel is important. Bullion banks are like spiders in the center of a web. They can feel the twitching of the flies in the web and determine the mood of the market better than anyone else and often in advance of others.
For example, if Mints are starting to see an increase in demand and begin running down stocks, they will start to take delivery ex-bullion banks, who as a result now have intel that retail demand is picking up before anyone else sees it in reported coin sales.
London Banker has expressed this idea much better than me in this post:
Over the past 25 years the financial markets of the world have become highly concentrated in the intermediation of a handful of firms, and regulation has been harmonised in the interests of these few firms. …
Sadly, these few global firms have been for some time in “a conspiracy against the public”, and have subverted the organs of public governance and the infrastructure of the financial markets to their purposes. …
Four global banks are intermediaries in 85 percent of OTC derivatives transactions. The same banks dominate prime brokerage. The same banks own large equity interests in the now demutualised exchanges, clearinghouses and even warehouses of the global markets. Naturally, the same banks dominated underwriting of securitised assets. The implications have scarcely been grasped of what this portends in terms of the information asymmetries and the opportunity to manipulate markets without risk.
Each of these roles gives these few banks a view into the positions of market investors. They know who owns what, using what leverage, under what terms, and trading in which markets. Knowing that, the manipulation of prices to impoverish investors and enrich the ruling banks is child’s play with a bit of ill-transparent HFT through proprietary dealing desks and connected hedge funds aligned with the firms. …
The only resilient solution is local, transparent markets with disintermediation of the controlling banks. Eliminating the information asymetries which allow them to see everyone’s positions, leverage and trading activity – and trade and ration liquidity accordingly – would go a long way to preventing further concentration. 
By Winton Bates, on March 16th, 2011
I had thought about writing something about gift giving before Christmas, but it might have looked as though I was complaining about how difficult it can be to buy gifts for people who seem to have just about everything they need already. (Perhaps I might even now be wandering into dangerous territory.)
In the past, economists have had some difficulty in understanding why people exchange gifts. The reason is that since the satisfaction that a person obtains from consumption spending is determined by her or his personal preferences it is difficult for anyone else to know what she or he would like. (I hope this is getting me out of trouble rather than digging a deeper hole.) Thus, some people end up with gifts they don’t want. (Fortunately, this rarely happens to me!) The remedy some economists have proposed is predictably crass: give money not goods. Neerav Bhatt has provided an entertaining discussion of this view here, including a clip from an episode of Seinfeld showing Elaine’s reaction to Jerry’s gift of cash for her birthday.
Greg Mankiw provides a good economic explanation of gift-giving in terms of signaling theory. If a person is able to provide a thoughtful gift – despite the difficulty of discovering what the receiver would really like – this sends a signal of the feelings that the giver has toward the receiver.
I suppose that is how gift giving helps to strengthen bonds. It can be wonderful when that happens. (In my experience it is most likely to happen when the potential receiver of the gift is willing to send some signals by dropping a hint or two about what she might like.)
The exchanges of gifts among members of social and business organizations at Christmas functions etc. is presumably also intended to promote bonding. One approach, which is probably fairly common, is for everyone attending such functions to buy and wrap an inexpensive gift, with all gifts being distributed randomly at the function. A member of a club that I belong to recently proposed a different approach: the names of all members would be put in a hat and each person would draw out a name and buy a gift anonymously for that person. This might have resulted in more people being given things that they might appreciate and might have helped to bond individual members of the club to all other members. It seems likely that if you know that the person who has given you a gift that you appreciate is a member of the club, but you don’t know who it is, you might have good feelings towards all other members. (As it happened, the club decided to continue with the practice established a couple of years earlier of donating gifts for children to a local charity rather than exchanging gifts between members. It would be interesting to know if the proposed method of gift exchange has been used elsewhere and what the effects have been.)
 While bonding helps explain exchanges of gifts between close friends and members of some organizations, does it is also explain exchanges of gifts between people who don’t know each other well? Exchanges of gifts between people in different organizations in the modern business world can be viewed as gestures of goodwill (albeit often tax deductible). Some anthropologists and archaeologists have encouraged the view that such exchanges of gifts to establish goodwill were much more common in tribal societies. According to this view, people in pre-industrial economies exchanged gifts to cement relationships, but people in modern economies trade with each other to make profits. Matt Ridley  suggests that is ‘patronising bunk’ (‘The Rational Optimist’, p. 133-4). As Ridley suggests, there is no reason to suppose that traders in all cultures have not always been acutely aware of the desirability of getting a good bargain for the valuable items that they are exchanging. There is some evidence that money can change the way that people perceive exchanges, but this seems to me to be based on misconceptions about money. An exchange of goods with strict reciprocity (barter) might appear more like an exchange of gifts than a commercial transaction, but people are fooling themselves if they think it is different in important respects (other than possible tax avoidance) from an identical exchange facilitated with the use of money.
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