The Financial Times’ annual review offers insight into contemporary capitalism (see ‘Tariff turmoil, a gold rush and the sinking dollar: 2025 in charts’ Financial Times December 25th). What the FT celebrates as a profitable year is a story about asset prices not workers’ livelihoods. Rising stock valuations and gold prices are distributional dynamics within capital not expansions of social wealth benefitting working class people.
The FT highlights tariffs as a defining moment of 2025. When Trump announced tariffs, markets went crazy. Prices of shares, currencies and other investments jumped up and down fast. As the FT implies, rich investors could, and did, make money from this because they have spare cash, experts and tools to buy and sell quickly. When prices fall suddenly, they buy cheap. When prices jump, they sell. Finance capital can ‘arbitrage’ market volatility. Yet for the working class the tariffs produced higher consumer prices and greater job insecurity in trade-exposed sectors.
The FT review highlights flows of capital into AI. That money is not based on profits existing today. Rather investors are betting AI will someday save companies huge amounts on labour and create new markets. Because those profits haven’t happened yet, the share prices are promises, not real earnings. If AI doesn’t deliver fast enough or if everyone builds the same AI tools and competition cuts profits, those promises collapse. Ireland, incidentally, will be strongly exposed to AI asset prices collapsing (see ‘AI bust would hurt Ireland more, ESRI warns’, Irish Times, December 18th). And for all that, AI is a potential risk for workers in the hands of the capitalist class threatening unemployment or labour intensification. AI will not take your job; your capitalist employer will.
Finally, the FT notes 2025 as potentially signalling a weakening in the dollar’s role as world money. The shift from dollars is driven by global capital in motion. Global capital is less confident about the US as a safe, steady place to park money. The US government is borrowing huge amounts of money which makes investors worry about future inflation, higher taxes and future financial bother. When confidence drops in the US, the capitalist class don’t want to hold as many dollars. Trump’s unpredictable policies also make the US look unstable. When trade rules change suddenly, capital worries the US economy could slow or become more chaotic. Instead of holding dollars, there has been a major move into gold, which doesn’t depend on governments keeping promises. Gold’s spectacular rise in demand in 2025 is perhaps the most revealing trend of the year: a warning light about confidence in the global monetary system itself (Banks and traders race to capitalise on gold’s historic rally, Financial Times, December 24th).
A year of “success” and “opportunity” for capital produced no substantive gains for working people, only uncertainty. Under capitalism, workers benefit only if real wages rise, job security improves or social provision expands. None of the 2025 trends described by the FT advance these. Capitalism continues to fail working people.
