Would you pay £63 for a chicken? The artist who built a street to show house price madness
Beginning with the very origins of money, [the show] moves from financial deregulation to the bonfire of mortgage-backed securities, to the gushing petrol pump of quantitative easing, and relentless house price inflation – noting that it would now cost £63 to buy a chicken if groceries had increased at the same rate as homes. With Fishbone’s smooth American accent providing a slow, measured monologue, calmly explaining the intricacies of the global banking system over the top of his Powerpoint slides, it’s as if The Big Short has been remade as a soothing meditation video.
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The film is certainly an entertaining 15 minutes. It charts how “money became postmodern” after Nixon removed the US dollar from the gold standard in 1971, giving central banks a free licence to print cash. “Money has always been a fictional thing,” Fishbone says, and all systems of valuation are “just social contracts based on mutual agreement and backed by some kind of institutional violence”.
The fiction doesn’t matter if we agree with it but that’s not his argument. The problem with the “mutual agreement” he mentions is that’s not universal…the property owners agree on how to value what they have but not with an eye to telling the have nots who make their property worth owning.