If a bank wants to borrow money, a broker needs quickly to find someone prepared to lend at an attractive rate; if a bank wants to lend, he – it’s a predominantly male profession – needs to find a borrower ready to pay a good rate. So a broker needs continuously to know who wants to borrow, who is prepared to lend, and on what terms. As one of them said to me, a broker might ‘speak to his big clients … have conversations with them maybe twenty-five times a day, which is twenty-five times as often as they speak to their wives’.
A broker needs to pass information to his clients as well as to receive it: that’s a major part of what they want from him, and a good reason to use the voicebox rather than the screen.

The brokers’ code of conduct prohibits passing on private knowledge of what a named bank is trying to do (unless a client is about to borrow from it or lend to it), but that restriction leaves plenty room for brokers to tell traders what has just happened and to convey the ‘feel’ of the market. There’s a grey area in which euphemisms can be used: in context, a broker and a trader might both know which bank is meant when the broker says that ‘the usual German’ has just done something.

That’s from Edinburgh Sociologist Don Mackenzie’s extraordinarily rich account of brokerage in the Current London Review of Books (the broader project of which it’s a part is outlined in this 2005 paper). As they say, read the whole thing. However, as Krugman pointed out yesterday, even if these and other credit markets are ‘unlocked’ (which – if the easing of the LIBOR price is anything to go by – they look like they will be) there is still ‘real world’ economic contractions to take place: GM will close plants, regardless of how politicians ‘talk up’ or ‘talk down’ the economy.

Elsewhere: Andrew Bartlett on Boosting First Home Owners Grant:

Why spend $1.5 billion dollars of taxpayer money to push up the price of housing? There may be downward pressure on house prices in some parts of Australia, but it is from a seriously overvalued level. We should try to let the air out of that bubble slowly, not use public money to keep pumping it up, especially when there are still so many problems with housing affordability in other parts of our housing markets.

Update: Will Hutton: The nightmare continues – on a high street near you

In The Guardian, Will Hutton explains why measures to halt the cascading crisis have been ineffectual to date. He might have made more explicit the implication that one of the basic structural problems is that action taken at the level of the nation state can be counter-productive given the disseminations and movements of capital, and that there are real domestic political barriers to coordinated action, as well as all the obvious problems of concertation through institutions such as the EU and the G20.

But he does make this point – harmonising with the note I’ve been sounding repeatedly – very clearly indeed:

There was no effective opposition. The left and organised labour collapsed as intellectual, social and political forces; there was no conviction that any alternative to this shareholder value-driven, financial, ‘securitised’ capitalism existed, or any political muscle to support it even if there were. Mainstream culture moved away from public purpose and fairness; the new priorities were individual self-fulfilment, personal experience and loyalty to self.

Hutton is perhaps more sanguine than I am, though, about the capacity of state action to turn all this around. In essence, he’s making an argument he’s been making for some years – about the virtues of other forms of capitalism than that which has been hegemonic in the neo-liberal Anglosphere. He briefly had some success in influencing Tony Blair in the early days of New Labour – in opposition, to be precise – in pushing ideas about “Stakeholder capitalism”. Whether a reorientation to a capitalism focused on the medium rather than the short term and on the real rather than the financial economy would work now – or whether as John Quiggin seems to think the Gordon Browns of the world are predisposed to be pushed, however much they might kick and scream, in something like the correct direction, is perhaps anyone’s guess as events continue to move at breakneck pace.

Immanuel Wallerstein puts a contrary view. I’m not quite sure if I agree – though he’s right more often than most. It is certain that what is occurring is Schumpeterian “creative destruction”, but whether or not the capacity to begin the cycle of valorisation and capital accumulation anew exists is something I think it’s better to be agnostic about at this stage. While I dare say he’s right about the end of a Krondatieff cycle, beyond that, prognostication seems to have a very short shelf life in these times.

It’s also interesting to observe that some are suggesting that the Canadian Tories’ “steady as she goes” approach is precisely what is leading to their decline in support in the campaign which has reached its final stretches. It may well be that Stephen Harper has more problems than just perceived inaction in the face of the credit crisis, but it probably is significant that voters are demanding state action to propitiate fear. In the Australian context, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Kevin Rudd and Labor are able to consolidate their support at a time when their momentum may have been sagging. The “cut through” of the opposition really diminishes at times of crisis, and it may be that Rudd has a chance to entrench himself with his response. To some degree that’s dependent on how far Australia is able to resist the global push towards recession, and again, I really would hesitate to place much value in any predictions at this stage.