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The house
You can’t see
Everyone loses
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Ten ways the economy is like a casino
In economist Ann Pettifor’s new book The Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles with People and the Planet (2026), she lays out the ways in which globalised finance increasingly represents a giant gambling ring – in which the stakes are all of our futures. For TANK, Ann provides a crash course in understanding our increasingly risky economic system.
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It values betting over working
It is packed with speculators who prefer to gamble with, and collect rents from, financial assets rather than leave the casino table and invest in clean energy, jobs, income and profits – to help society tackle climate breakdown.
Debt is baked in
Like a problem gambler, punters in financial markets borrow escalating levels of “easy” money to turbocharge their crazy bets: billions of debt that regularly capsizes the casino.
If you’re rich, powerful and irresponsible, it doesn’t matter if you lose
Like gambling addicts, speculators in giant global food and energy markets are often more at ease with placing larger bets in defiance of the threat of losses, the risks and wider economic consequences.
The house
always wins
Bets on these financial assets are like bets on casino chips by those who don’t own the chips.
Crime pays
Like Hollywood casinos, the deregulated Global Casino liberates and empowers money launderers, mafia bosses, drug cartels, terrorists, corrupt politicians, thieves and fraudsters.
The design is deliberate
Like the flashing lights and sounds of the slot machine, the pace and culture of the financial system is designed to encourage irresponsible risk-taking. For financial traders, the excitement of betting in different currencies over.
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It hides what you’re losing
By using the mental disassociation of the speculative “chip” or asset from real money, the speculator is blinded to the rise and fall in value of collateral used to back or guarantee his bets.
You can’t see
what’s going on
The lawless, deregulated global financial system is hidden from the public behind the “closed doors” of financial “complexity” and by players in invisible markets addicted to risk-taking.
Everyone loses
in the end
In casinos, the house always wins. In the Global Casino, bets in the “shadow banking” system have global real-life ramifications for both the invisible gamblers of bond and equity markets, their creditors and beyond the borders of the casino – the world’s people.
It has an uneasy relationship with the state
Gambling is regulated, but today’s financial croupiers gamble with assets valued at $217 trillion in the financial stratosphere known as “shadow banking” – speculation that takes place beyond the rules and regulations of democratic authority. .