I remember learning about money and velocity. Apparently money doesn’t do society much good sitting in a pillow. Rather, it should be circulating – invested – enabling the endeavors of man.

For the last decade a mantra has been buzzing in the business background: we're doing it for the shareholders. The buzz, though, is coming from a few well-connected and (now) wealthy top executives, not from the bulk of individual shareholders, whose interests have been poorly represented.

In today's Sunday New York Times Jonathan Haidt has a piece titled Forget the Money, Follow the Sacredness. He writes in the context of the 2012 US presidential election, but his insight deserves wider application. He speaks of tribal and group behaviour, and observes that “the great trick that humans developed at some point in the last few hundred thousand years is the ability to circle around a tree, rock, ancestor, flag, book or god, and then treat that thing as sacred”. We have done that with The Market.

The PBS Newshour of March 15 contains not one but two segments of importance both to the financial world and to the rest of us. The first is a reaction to Greg Smith's Why I am Leaving Goldman Sachs, wherein he speaks of the firm's lack of integrity and disregard – even scorn – for its customers. The second (21:20 to 29:46 in the March 15 Newshour) is an interview with Robert Harris, whose new novel, The Fear Index, came true even as he was writing it. It seems that certain hedge funds have mopped up the scientists who were to work on the Texas Supercollider (before it was cancelled) and got them instead to develop software which scans the news (a digital feed from Bloomberg first and foremost) for anything that could spook the market. The software then makes the appropriate trades. At one such fund author Robert Harris (in real life, in real time) watched a software algorithm make 1.5 million dollars in twenty minutes.

But the most significant and disturbing moment, for me, comes at 25:22 in the March 15 Newshour. It seems that although high-frequency trading firms make up only 2% of the 20,000 trading firms operating today, they make 75% of all trades. And – and here I nearly fell off the couch – the average time a stock investment is held these days is twenty-two seconds.

Remember how money with velocity is good? By that measure we should be doing very well indeed. What happened?

We could ask ourselves Who is this shareholder to whom executives pay lip-service? And Who or what is The Market that we seem to revere and to which politicians kowtow? Is it a Wizard of Oz? Or, as Robert Harris says, is it more like a Frankenstein run amok?

We would do better worshiping a god.