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…showed last 75 words of 1147 total…more lucrative to do. That usually means gambling, 'speculation' on whatever comes to hand: commodities, foreign exchange, bonds, stocks, shares, all kinds of 'instruments' created for just this purpose. These days, the temptingly volatile 'emerging markets' of the South and former Soviet bloc have become speculative playgrounds. Foreign-exchange transactions, for example, now amount to more than a thousand billion dollars a day, with only a small proportion relating to any 'real' economic activity at all.