The advent of new supercomputers that can use algorithms to trade thousands of shares in a blink of an eye or read the transactions of slower computers and human traders and benefit by buying the sought shares more quickly and on-selling them to those purchasers, have subverted the market and destroyed its value to society. It now means that those more wealthy organisations that have the fastest access to shares have a considerable advantage over ordinary investors. It is in fact super speed insider trading.

More importantly as these algorithmic transactions take over more of the market share, trading will become increasingly for speculation and enhance the ability of these super speculators to manipulate the true values of companies and therefore be able to destroy productive businesses for a quick share profit.

These algorithms will not be calculating the loss of jobs or the disruption of communities. Neither will they calculate the impacts on life systems like the quality of the air we breathe. The non-monetary impacts of tornadoes and floods, droughts and rising temperatures on people outside the air-conditioned board rooms in New York, London and Beijing mean nothing to super computers.

There is a growing disconnect between the real world and real world impacts and share trading and the market system itself. The market is working for the wealthy priests of the temple of Mammon and sucking the life out of world communities and the planet. It has an overwhelming influence on society to the extent that it has become society’s master.

If there is no benefit to society in this type of trading the question arises whether society should continue with this type of market system or change it for something more sophisticated? A system that meets the material and social needs of humanity and maintains  the biological world they live in.

— for more on this story, click here for an infographic on ‘Trading @ the Speed of Light’ —