A new series of documenaries by Adam Curtis -
Can't Get You Out of My Head- is now showing on the BBC iPlayer. I have not seen it, but last night watched the four-part series,
The Mayfair Set, first shown on the BBC in 1999, and now on YouTube. It tells the story of the founder of the SAS, David Stirling, and the men he associated with at the Clermont Club in Mayfair -the asset strippers Jim Slater, James Goldsmith and 'Tiny' Rowland. It shows how these men broke into the ossified corporations and the safe but moribund City of London Stock Exchange to make share-owning appealing to individuals. They did it by identifyng corporations or companies that had failed to modernize, were over-staffed and under-performing. They bought shares, took control of the company, then stripped it of its worst assets, or more commonly, the expensive component known as wages, then reaped the profits as the share price soared. In the end, it was share dealing that became 'market activity' but was not in concrete terms, a business that created jobs, indeed, the only new business that was formed was the brokerage firms that were only concerned with shares- at the same time as this was happening, for example, Shell and BP created a new petroleum business in the North Sea that not only returned handsome profits to its shareholders, but created jobs and new assets, and just as Slater, Goldsmith and Rowland took their pirate business into the US and Africa, so in time, the Pension Funds they manipulated took back control of their assets and in time, Slater went bankrupt, and Goldsmith a little bit mad. It was an episode of some importance in the context of Reagan and Thatcher as Curtis argues it marked the moment when Governments lost control of theire economies. But as the section on Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky shows, it was often illegal too so that in time, the 'Corporate' giants took back control of the market. Four fascinating films -the first film on Stirling is weakest, and fails to take the story of the first war in the Yemen beyond 1965 when it can be argued the gains Saudi Arabia made were lost. It also fails to put neo-Liberalism and market economics into a broader context by referring back to people such as Hayek and von Mises and the Mont Pelerin Society. It never mentions the UK entering the Common Market/EEC, and places more emphasis on the Thatcher Government lifting Exchange Controls rather than mentioning the Big Bang as an additional factor in the creation of more liberal global markets.
But a compelling set of films of its time, with a comical entry at the end by Mohammed Fayed, and earlier, a reminder with regard to Milken, Drexel Burnham and Ivan Boesky, that Rudolph Giuliani Jr used to be a crusading lawyer.
The first film is here, the next three in the YouTube sidebar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mayfair_Set
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episod...out-of-my-head
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtgEXlWDpuY