The savings game

No-one can take other people's money just to spend (except governments and thieves). You can only take money if you put it to work to earn enough to reward the donor. To do that you need to be a wealth-creator.

Wealth-creators are one end of the investment chain. They use resources (people, materials, money) to create more wealth than they have consumed. Typically (but by no means exclusively) these are corporations (or companies). Like Glaxo or Shell or, in the US, Walmart or Apple.

Feeding this chain are savers. Irritatingly the preferred name for 'savers' in the UK is 'consumers', when 'consumption' is the opposite of what they do.

The players

A cast of thousands make their living out of this money chain. We categorise these players into owners, directors, providers, markets, feeders, advisers, coaches, government and regulators.

'Owners' means shareholders. We take the lid off public corporate ownership.

What drives Directors, and why do they earn so much?

Fund management groups and insurance companies (at least in some of their guises) are Providers.

Markets are the essential grease to the wheels.

Advisers, brokers, investment bankers, stock analysts, journalists and investor relations advisers are Feeders.

Advisers come in many forms and we attempt to disentangle this complicated minefield. We have a separate page on the important subset of Financial Coaches.

Government is important, particularly the Treasury (because of its control of tax and spending), the Department of Works and Pensions (because of its responsibility for advice) of advice and the Department of Education (just beginning to wake up to the whole-of-life importance of money management).

Regulators are critical. The most important for us is the Financial Conduct Authority, responsible to the Treasury.

The dividing lines between categories can be vague - particularly between feeders and providers. And many players play more than one part. But the one thing they have in common is that they are paid out of the money chain that runs from the wealth-creator to the saver (The Fixed Sum Game). That means all are ultimately paid from the end of the chain - i.e. the saver. That's you.