That could use some clarification. Oh BTW could you help me with a little problem I’m having with importing 7 kg of rough gem quality diamonds? See what happened is my bank in South Africa got hit with all this market unrest and my funds for the export duty was frozen with that of many other companies. In short if you could wire the $7,400 [US] to my other account, once the diamonds are back here I will repay you plus a bonus of $40,000 [US]; if you can do this before close of business today I can also add unlimited free porn for life, 25,000 unexercised John Scanlon Jan. 2002 options, and a face to face with Al Gore the inventor.

No wonder their housing and financial markets are falling apart.

It’s also a line of thought that goes all the way back to Rousseau’s Social Contract, with its urge to “allow neither rich men nor beggars”, for the latter will sell public liberty to the former at the first opportunity.

Which all goes to show that petty-bourgeois crypto-fascism has a long and distinguished past, and probably a vibrant future, alas…

@33: Blimey, what happened? Walk into a Guy Ritchie movie by mistake?

Ginger Yellow, this is completely off-topic, but I have been in London 3 months and in that time I have been shafted in every possible way by the “decent hard-working” people of London. Throw the damn lot of them on the dole and replace them with someone who actually knows how to do their job, most probably a feckless foreigner – and string up all tabloid editors who think that the “decent hard working” British person is anything but an incompetent fool.

I would send my manufacturing business offshore in the blink of an eye if I had to deal with the British worker. And given the incompetence of everyone from the toilet cleaners right up to their bank managers, it hardly surprises me that the higher echelons I don’t deal with are incompetent fools as well.

It appears to be a condition of the British workplace that it is dirty, rude, the staff can’t spell your name, they lose your money, send your parcels to the wrong address, cannot redirect mail, don’t understand their own business processes, sell your contact details to criminal gangs, and lie about every mistake they make because it’s easier than taking 10 seconds to correct it. And yes, they can’t even put paper towels into the holders properly when (if) they clean the toilets. These are not people I would trust with 1 trillion pounds of credit derivatives!

I’m sticking with stochastic contingency.
And I pray a lot.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/17/business/hedge.php

Half true. At least there haven’t been large scale direct bailouts of hedge funds so far, but they are failing at a steady clip despite benefitting from the massive infusions of liquidity being thrown at the system as a whole. If you can remember back to 2007, it was the failure of hedge funds link to Bear Stearns that signalled the extension of the crisis beyond the subprime mortgage sector.

The lives of hard-working people in Britain are increasingly blighted by a feckless underclass whose indolence they are forced to bankroll through the tax and benefits system and a ruthless overclass which siphons off billions.

Unless action is taken to stop all these spivs in their tracks, decent people will lose faith in the dynamism of free enterprise and the moral imperative of striving for self-reliance.

It is a horrible thought but the greed of a few bankers and corporate fat cats could hand an undeserved lifeline to the failed creed of State socialism. It must not be allowed to happen.

http://tinyurl.com/3rc2s9

My point was just that of the potentially risky areas, most commentators (the admirable nouriel roubini excepted) would have fingered hedge funds and perhaps private equity as those requiring more regulation.

Don’t get me wrong. I support more regulation so that taxpayers aren’t again on the hook for these clowns’ mistakes. But what kind of regulation? Banning short selling seems like a terrible idea – it just postpones the inevitable.

And with all the talk of financial apocalyse, the real economy isn’t doing too badly (so far). Anyone who said there’d never be another recession is an idiot.

PS for the record I’ve been boring my friends about the housing bubble since 2003.

Bhaaaa, breathtaking.

June 26, 2006
JS-4338

Remarks of Emil W. Henry, Jr.
Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions
U.S. Department of the Treasury
At the outset, let me be clear on the meaning of systemic risk: it is the potential for the financial distress of a particular firm or group of firms to trigger broad spillover effects in financial markets, further triggering wrenching dislocations that affect broad economic performance. Perhaps a useful analogy is to think about systemic risk as an illness that can become highly contagious.
[...]
Systemic events can unfold by direct and/or indirect spillovers. Direct spillovers arise when the failure of a particular firm creates substantial losses for those who carry direct exposure with such firm, such as its creditors. Indirect spillovers typically develop, not from direct exposures to the firm at the epicenter of the crisis, but when this firm causes a lack of confidence leading to a sense of panic and turbulence that results in action that generates substantial losses for firms that were not directly exposed to the impaired firm. Such spillovers � not the initial event—typically take the greatest toll on economic activity and, in the case of the GSEs, the potential for both direct and indirect spillover effects is nothing short of breathtaking

Sorry, no time to run the the other several hundred thousand hits on the Google to whittle down to the several or tens of thousands relevant. Mission accomplished?