Bankers and Farmers

“The Invisible Hand Will Do Its Magic”

 Jim Rogers is an author, financial commentator and successful international investor. He has been frequently featured in Time, The New York Times, Barron’s, Forbes, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and is a regular guest on Bloomberg and CNBC

 He writes (14 May) in “Jim Roger’s Blog” HERE 

"We don't need more bankers. What we need are more farmers. The invisible hand will do its magic." - in CBS Market Watch” 

Comment

If  “The invisible hand” exists – a Big “if” – then it already has done what it can with its “magic”.  As it hasn’t achieved much to produce more farmers, we can expect more bankers than farmers, unless more banks fail and some ex-bankers run off to live on farms, possibly re-possessed when they were bankers. The statement is empty of predictive value, irrespective of Jim’s preferences for farmers, which, of course, is the kind of empty rhetoric heard from people chatting at smart people’s dinner parties.

However, the statement also reveals that Jim knows little about the empty content of the myth of the invisible hand that was invented at 1940s dinner parties while chatting about the awesome Soviet propaganda against markets at the start of the Cold War.  No doubt some smart international investor declaimed his brilliance with what he considered to be a knowing remark about invisible hands that he had picked up in a boring lecture years ago at College.

From a reputation for brilliance, investors made fortunes, certainly more than they could ever earn from farming.  In time we ended up with more bankers, financial analysts, investment advisors, and witty-sounding, dinner party guests.  We also ended up with fewer farmers.