The Folks Who Gamble Your Life Away

Here in the US, we’ve grown used to casinos and sports betting, with some folks accepting the idea that politicians and others even gamble on military action and election results. As a person who played nickel ante poker with coworkers after work and enjoyed a day at the track back in the day I kind of get it. Despite the commonality of the gambling experience, I bet even those who can’t resist watching a ball game without their device open to an app for parley bets would have some kind of negative reaction to the idea that their retirement funds are used in a remarkably similar manner as those twenty-dollar parleys in the last NBA game they watched, except with much greater consequences when you lose. Indeed, it’s not just retirement funds, but the bulk of all investments that are part of what British political economist Susan Strange called the global casino in a 1986 book appropriately titled The Global Casino.

Using Strange’s work as a foundation and the title of her book as the beginning of her book’s title, economist Ann Pettifor’s recently published book The Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles with People and the Planet explains how this form of capitalism has come to dominate the global economy while placing the majority of the globe’s population in a constant danger. It is a danger based not on supply and demand, not on weather or war, but a danger based almost entirely on the high stakes gambling of the financialization of the market. That financialization and its current manifestations are the result of a number of causes, all of which can be wrapped up into two words: neoliberal capitalism. For those who still don’t understand what this phrase means—who still think it has something to do with liberal policies helping the poor and the disenfranchised—neoliberal capitalism is an approach to economics that works towards the privatization of everything for the profit of the rich and powerful (and occasionally some of their sycophants). That is its only real criteria and woe to those who suffer because of it. The late British Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher once described the ideal world under neoliberal capitalism: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” Of course, Ms. Thatcher could make that remark while being paid by the very society she hoped to destroy.

A few paragraphs into her introduction, Pettifor introduces South Korean billionaire Masayoshi Son and his Japanese bank, SoftBank. She proceeds to tell a story of a gamble Son took on a business proposal from a New Yorker who had a proposal called WeWork; a network of offices around the US where independent tech workers could go to work even though they were self-employed. Not only was the idea a fantasy of Son and the young hustler making the proposal, the potential value of the idea they discussed ($30 trillion) was even more so. As it turned out, the business collapsed almost before it began, the victim of the COVID pandemic. Pettifor continues, describing Son as “the single largest foreign speculator in capitalist America and communist China…and the boss of one of the top ten most indebted firms, continually threatening financial implosion.” (9) In other words, Son manipulates debt, using the potential value of that debt to invest in start-ups and other ventures and those investments artificially inflate the values on the world’s markets. In other words, like cryptocurrency, he’s working a Ponzi scheme.

As Pettifor further discusses, almost everything Son does is not illegal in the countries he does it in. If a national government does step in, the Sons of the world just find another country where they can maintain their scam. Consequently, this high stake gambling is an essential part of certain national economies—the United Kingdom being one. Besides taking risks with the livelihoods and futures of millions whose money is invested in this scheme, it also serves as a major (if not the major) money laundering operation for illegal arms dealers, human traffickers and narcotics traffickers, among others. Even more than capitalism itself, this particular form is so amoral it becomes immoral.

Of course, given its major role in world economics, Pettifor takes a look at the oil market. March 9, 2026, the day I wrote this review, saw the price of oil on the global futures market swing from around ninety dollars a barrel up to one hundred twenty dollars a barrel and back again to ninety dollars. While this wild swing was certainly due in large part to the US-Israeli attack on Iran and the Iranian response to it, it’s reasonable to say that the only real difference between that day’s events and the way the oil market normally works was the time span. The reality Pettifor describes is one in which during the years 2020 to 2022 the sharp increases in oil prices were mostly due to “excessive speculation was responsible for 24 to 48 percent of the increase in WTI (West Texas Intermediate) crude price from October 2020 to June 2022. Those estimates translated into an oil price increase of $18 to $36 a barrel and an increase in the US inflation rate of 0.75 to 1.5 percentage points during that same period.” (129) In other words, supply and demand is only a somewhat small part of the picture. Politicians attempting to regulate this speculation are, to put it simply, afraid to.

The Global Casino is an important book. While its explanation of the current capitalist economies in much of the so-called West is incomplete, it does a more than competent job of revealing the role played by speculators in those economies. It is a role that is not only much greater than it should be, but is also a primary cause of the growing inequality inside nations and between nations—an inequality that means the financial dealings of only a few individuals can (and has) destroyed untold numbers of lives. This knowledge makes the economic downfall of those individuals essential to the continuation of the human race.

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