ABSTRACT
After going walkabout on Wall Street I plunged back in time to the cradles of civilisation, before the earliest forms of buying and selling. This helped me to distinguish bazaars from the market. In some form or the other bazaars have been with us for at least 5,000 years – as gathering places for many different kinds of communication and exchange where value is expressed in multiple languages. By contrast the market is a relatively recent human construct that has sometimes been compared to a computer – a self-regulating machine that can itself ensure the equilibrium of economic activities.
