Stephen Kinsella: Bet on it - the house will always win

We are in for a period of low growth, low inflation and low yield for some time to come

The New York Stock Exchange on August 26, after six days of market chaos had erased $2.1 trillion of value from US stocks. Picture: Getty

Writing in the 1990s, economists could credibly buttonhole ‘financial intermediaries’ into simple categories: banks, pension funds, insurance companies and ‘other’, where ‘other’ included hedge funds, venture capitalists and a few other specialised money management services.

Today, any categorisation of the ‘other’ column quickly runs into ‘angels on the head of a pin’ territory. Everything from derivative traders to vulture funds to exotic investments like sovereign debt of defunct countries to shadow banks to ...