Its here at last folks, the show you have all been waiting for, The Conservative Party Credit Crunch Conference. How interesting it will be as Lord Snooty Cameron and his Pals take centre stage to hear what they have to say about the meltdown of the global economy and the irresponsibility of the Merchant Bankers who caused it. Especially when you remember Lord Snooty and his Pals were at school with that very same bunch of Merchant Bankers. In fact some of Lord Snootys chums used to be Merchant bankers when they were younger but, we hear, now they are serious politicians their tastes have matured and they can only be satisfied by a couple of visits a week to Nanny Whiplash.
No doubt as the chums take the podium they will unite behind Lord Snooty Cameron in blaming the hapless Gordon Brown for the crisis. Fair play, he was in charge of the tuck money for eleven years but we must not forget it was Lord Snootys Party, The Conservatives, led by Margaret Thatcher who kicked off the economic madness that led to the bubble and squeak economics of the past quarter century by a hasty and ill though out package of deregulatory measures.
Before Thatchers disastrous meddling on behalf of her hubbys cronies, short selling, known by the much more sinister sounding name of arbitrage, the process of selling something one does not own in the expectation of buying back the asset more cheaply before returning it to the owner at a profit was illegal. People could go to prison for it. So was arbitrage a restrictive practice holding back markets or just good sense.
Whatever we think, short selling, in effect betting on stock market movements, was so lucrative that trade in derivatives, administrative vehicles facilitating such trades, became more profitable than trading in boring old stocks, commodities and bonds. The risks became greater too but nobody mentioned that.
As time passed the Merchant Bankers became more greedy and took bigger risks. They were not risking their own moolah of course, oh no, they were betting with your pension funds and personal savings.
There have already been two financial disasters, in the early 1990s and the dotcom + 9/11 bust of 2000 and 2001. if once is unfortunate and twice looks like carelessness to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, then three times is downright stupidity.
So it will be a tad hypocritical for Lard Snooty and his pals to stand up and condemn the Labour Party for mismanaging the economy. They were simply playing the game invented by the Conservative economists with more flair and panache than the Conservatives have shown.
So it will be like blaming Brazil for Englands decline as the foremost footballing nation.
It never ceases to amaze me how many forms bullshit comes in;)
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Only one form Jack, its just the packaging that makes it look different. The stink is always the same.
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I’m still not clear why Labour with the National Snotgobbler as Chancellor, couldn’t have repealed Thatcher’s legislation at any time in the past 11 years if it was so objectionable.
Actually, the shift away from shorting on the LSE itself will not really stop them. They are still doing it, only now its called what it always was – a ‘financial bet’.
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It didn’t actually stop them back when it was illegal, just slowed the buggers down.
What really dug us into the hole this time was the market in CDOs (collateralised debt obligations – bundles of dodgy debts in other words). Shorting in these requires manipulation of the markets.
The same techniques worked on the betting exchanges that trade horse racing investments. It’s virtually impossible to be 100% certain a horce will win but very easy (and difficult to detect) to ensure one loses. So you bet against a well fancied horse by offering generous odds to attract money safe in the knowledge the jockey will get it boxed on the rails coming up the home straight.
Manipulating the futures market works much the same way.
Labour could easily have restored regulation but as Guido Fawkes points out in the post you link below, they had a lot of very generous supporters among the hedge fund managers.
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National Snotgobbler? Ewww.
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It seems that Labour has friends with a financial stake in short selling:
http://www.order-order.com/2008/09/gordon-browns-millions-from-hedge-fund.html
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Thanks Shilpa. I never had a comment like that before 🙂
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