Closing in

A clever poster of Sir Fred Goodwin, the ex-boss of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) who resigned just before the bank posted a loss of £24bn for 2008, the largest ever loss in UK corporate history. Sir Fred left RBS with an annual pension of about £700,000.

In 2004 he was knighted for his services to banking.

For the non-UK readers, the targeting benefit thieves motif is used by Government’s Department of Works and Pensions for their campaign. Apparently benefit fraud costs the UK taxpayer £800m in 2008. RBS lost 30 times this amount during the same period.

(picture posted here)

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King Henry and his mint-men

Henry gives a lesson on how to deal with rogue bankers, as described in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle. A G20 special

A.D. 1125
In this year sent the King Henry,
before Christmas, from Normandy to England,
and bade that all the mint-men that were in England
should be mutilated in their limbs; that was,
that they should lose each of them the right hand,
and their testicles beneath.
This was because the man that had a pound
could not lay out a penny at a market.
And the Bishop Roger of Salisbury
sent over all England, and bade them all
that they should come to Winchester at Christmas.
When they came thither,
then were they taken one by one,
and deprived each of the right hand
and the testicles beneath.
All this was done within the twelfth-night.
And that was all in perfect justice,
because that they had undone all the land
with the great quantity of base coin.

(from Private Eye)

the future of the stock market

Bernie Madoff overdid himself on a conference last year under the big title The Future of the Stock Market.

It is worth watching it (or reading the transcript) for its comedy value.

Look out for gems like:
<<[…] by and large in today’s regulatory environment, it’s virtually impossible to violate rules. This is something that the public really doesn’t understand. If you read things in the newspaper and you see somebody violate a rule, you say well, they’re always doing this. But it’s impossible for a violation to go undetected, certainly not for a considerable period of time.>>

or the moderator of the discussion asking Bernie the ultimate question:
<<How do you guys make money, then?>>

running away from the pharaoh

Everyone is talking about Bernie Madoff and his $50bn pyramid (Ponzi) scheme nowdays. As a guy pointed on HIGNFY last week, with this money Bernie could probably buy the pyramids.

As everyone is asking each other how this could happen, this SEC document shows that the SEC knew about Bernie’s shop since at least 1999.

A certain Harry Markopolos (sic) was working for a rival shop in 1999, when his bosses asked him to investigate Bernie’s super profits, and try to replicate them. He couldn’t, and informed the SEC of his suspicions. But how could the SEC touch Bernie, the “pater familia” of the Bernie empire with seats in NASD and the rest.

Well people are not that stupid. The reason that the funds invested with Bernie turned a blind eye was not that they did not notice the ultra-low volatility/ultra-high returns combination Bernie was posting. It was because they thought it was an outcome of front-running and inside trading, and they did not want to interfere with it.

You scum bag, you maggot/ you cheap lousy faggot/ Happy Christmas your arse/ I pray God it’s our last, as the Pogues aptly put it.

I hate to admit it, but I think I am with Taleb on this one.