They only want your money

Mayfair Set (Documentary, 1999)
Produced, Written, Directed by Adam Curtis

#2 Entrepreneur Spelt S.P.I.V.

(spiv - A flashy, slick operator who makes a living more from speculation or profiteering than from actual work. The kind of guy who wears a shiny medallion, goes bankrupt from a dodgy swampland development scheme, but still has a big house in his wife's name.)

Jim Slater

Is yet another angle of looking at how businessmen and gamblers gambled away the British economy. The 1950s saw the rise of Captain's of Industry who were owners of big family businesses that spearheaded the industrialization of the nation. These captains worked with politician to prosper the nations. Jim Slater, a newspaper columnist who wrote under the nom de plume of The Capitalist thought he had found the perfect system to analyse the market. The boom of the economy in full scale in the late 50s and he was making loads of money. He realised that the family businesses were not really owned by the family but by the shareholders as they were listed. He used this knowledge to make a hostile takeover of the Coote's family cork business. From the profit that he made this transaction, he went on to buy other businesses and abandon the previous one. His eye was on the profit, not on the idea to improve the business.

James Goldsmith

Other 'entrepreneurs' followed his technique. Many of them were risk taking high stake gamblers from the Clairmont club in Mayfair, e.g. James Goldsmith and Tiny Rowland.

Tiny Rowland

 1964 saw crisis arising from the previous boom years going out control. To boost productivity among the workers, the entrepreneurs were roped in to stimulate the industry. What these people end up doing was just destroying the industries forever with no effect on productivity. The money from the industries were infused into the stock market for the gamblers from Clairmont club to make profits.
Tiny Rowland made his money through his sneaky manoeuvres of undermining other companies.
In Nigeria, he bribed their officials not to renew Spears' Ashanti gold mines licence. When the news reached the British stock market, Spear's shares plummeted. Rowland bought over the shares and the company for a song in Nigeria.This squandering of money from the government to be pumped into the market continued. Many companies including Rolls Royce went bust. Even though these entrepreneurs walked hand in hand with politicians, they were only concerned with increasing the profits for the share holders, not in helping to restructure the economy. In midst of this facade, war in the middle East prompted the Arabs to increase the petrol price by 400%! The entrepreneurs realised that nobody actually controlled the stock market - Slater went bankrupt, Rowland and Goldsmith disappeared to Africa and US respectively.