THE ODESSA FILES

improve and accelerate communication, an arena where ideas and
gossip could be exchanged.

Amazon, eBay, lastminute.com and other first movers of the cyber
enterprise world came out of left field. But their success did not go
unnoticed. Thousands upon thousands of people tried their hand at
setting up websites. This being one of those historical moments that
emerge once in a generation, and where human greed and fantasy
coincide, it was not long before banks and venture capitalists convinced
themselves that e-commerce was a guarantee of quick riches. They
began pouring money into these companies, the great majority of which
were intrinsically worthless entities despite having been capitalised to
the tune of millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars. The first major
bubble of the globalised age had begun, and how fitting that the bubble
was in high-tech stocks.

But while most dot.com companies were indeed commercial
Potemkin villages, firms already well established in the real world found
that there were distinct advantages to conducting part of their business
on the Web.

Banks were swift out of the traps in this regard because, as already
noted, it dawned on them that if they could persuade their clients to
make payments and manage their accounts online, then they would
not have to pay employees to do so. Those customers who felt comfort-
able with the Web were almost certain to prefer the close control over
their finances that Internet banking enabled.

At this time the Masters of the Universe, the new class of financial
capitalist, were casting off the fetters that had in the past restricted their
speculative activity on derivative markets. Essentially, politicians in Wash-
ington and London had issued them with a licence to gamble (the dot-
com boom was a fine example) and, as the price of assets that were worth
very little rose to great heights, money was lent on the supposed value
of those assets. For a decade the Western world was bathed in cheap
credit. The Ages of Empire and Capital morphed into the Age of Plastic.

Personal credit-card debt in the four biggest users of plastic — the US,
the UK, Japan and Canada — started rising manically in the mid-1990s.
In the space of ten years from 1997, the number of cards in circulation
worldwide rose from just under 1.5 billion to 3 billion, and average indi-
vidual debt among the most addicted users, the Americans, doubled
from $5,000 to $10,000. Banks adored our new-found affection for