The Mechanics Of Rigging A Premiership Match #

All legitimate football matches resemble one another, each corrupt football match is corrupt in its own way.

In association with our primary broker, today we bring you an exclusive post for Dietrological Professional clients only.

Out of all the games that have been fixed so far in the English Premiership this season, we have decided to select just one for a closer analysis of the scam, the corruptions, the illegalities and the relative incentives of the participants.
We decided to select this particular match due to the slightly unusual level of the machinations.

For this particular scam, which was successful as a match result and as a trading medium for all participants, included #######################
representing both ############################# and #####################################, #################, ############################################################################

Prior to the match, this scam was known widely around the English industry, as the outcome was effectively being traded as currency for future favours.

In our post, we reveal the primary impacts on this rigged match - the betting patterns, the holistic structure, links to similar events but not the names of the individuals concerned.

Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to subscribers only.

© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological

We Are Football's Financial Fraud Squad #

There are some tricky people about, you know what I mean...

Last night's Premiership match between Fulham and Wigan Athletic was fixed.
Large amounts of insider trading in selective markets, together with creative disinformation carefully sprinkled elsewhere as 'news', ensured a killing for those close to the scam.

This is not the first occasion this season that this operation has been involved in cornering a match market.

Of course, as with the separate Norwich City versus Derby County Championship match, currently under investigation by the FA due to unusual betting patterns, there is a major regulatory issue in that the footballing authorities have no jurisdiction to request betting account details from the firms accepting the insider bets.
So SBOBET and IBCBET, both of which are based in Singapore, were asked by the FA to pass on to it all trading information relating to the rigged Championship match, such as the names of people who placed bets, but have refused to do so after deeming such a move an "excessive" breach of privacy.

No, its not.
Their attitude is an excessive breach of probity.

We are talking about the alleged criminalising of match outcomes in the leading English leagues here, not somebody betting a fiver on a rigged horserace at Happy Valley.
The large numbers of individuals, many of them the 'public' face of the game in Britain, #################################################################
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They are directly destroying this sport.
And underground bookmakers are allowed to refuse to disclose the details of these corruptions???

The layers are going to continue to accept these bets as they treat it simply as buying information.
So the assured Fulham victory then ripples throughout the ########### markets while we focus very closely on the source of those waves.

What is FIFA playing at?
Why are the pitifully inept sousveillance bodies unable to detect the hyperrealities of this 'sport'?
Is there some reason that the heads of the various regional bodies could not get together with Blatter to develop some hard-hitting global regulation that separates the integrity of the game from the murky markets that currently define the outcomes?

Our network of global market operators recognises suspicious market actively immediately.
Total Information Awareness combines the information from insider activities in the betting markets ###############################################################
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The data are startlingly revealing.

So Total Information Awareness, a web of, admittedly, privileged operators is able to determine the involvement via a mixture of ##################################
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With all the other devices in their possession, why are FIFA, UEFA, the Premier League and the FA unable to put two and two together?

The allowance of anonymity in trading must be terminated.
The global markets have to be thoroughly regulated by the game's central body FIFA, with regional responsibilities also under the FIFA umbrella.
Any involvement in underground or private markets must result in an immediate lifetime ban on the individual(s) involved.

In financial markets in the US, hardly a definer of market integrity in these entertaining times, the Commitment of Traders Report enforces market and company insiders to fully disclose their market positions in entities in which they have insider or privileged knowledge.
FIFA should enforce the same.
And it must be public, no gaming the information as so often occurs.

The regulatory bodies and sousveillance operations that will be needed to police the integrity of the game must pay a proper rate to attract the most skilled Asian market makers into the white market.
Incentives need to be inversed.

We could name all the individuals involved in last night's skullduggery at Craven Cottage, but what is the point in that?
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If the game is to be saved, the key factor is the separation of gambling and sport.
While matches are liquid to the £1 billion level, and while there is absolutely nothing to stop insiders trading on events over which they have influence, you are simply paying over the odds to watch the footballing equivalent of the 3:15 at Cartmel.

We are currently discovering the enhanced analytical powers created by our combination of our market trading software, the Unified Trading Model, with our Holistic Sabermetrics software, that analyses the ###########################
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Because we are open source within our web, Total Information Awareness are bringing a range of analytical and, more importantly, cultural inputs to the optimisation of the combined model.
Although there are still some issues to be ironed out, the initial data runs have been more than fascinating.

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Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to subscribers only.

© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological

Bung!!! Bung!!! Bung!!! #

"We love you, 'Arry!" cried a delusional woman with a split personality.

"Judas!" shrieked another of the bewildered flock.

What a day!

Portsmouth, with its proud maritime history - Pride in what exactly? Its role in the transatlantic slave trade? Its deportation of large numbers of Irish to the thrills of Botany Bay? - was yesterday honouring one of its greatest operators with a Freedom of the City.
Harry Redknapp, the man who claimed he would never leave Portsmouth, should really have been more honest, and gone with not leaving Pompey until the Betfair price looked tempting enough for a little dabble.

Over-the-top obviously being a regional competency, Portsmouth Council are considering renaming one of the Guildhall bells in Harry's honour - it will be known as the ############# Bell, apparently...
BUNG!!! BUNG!!! BUNG!!!

And the honours and endorsements just keep rolling in - check out the entire Redknapp family jovially playing Wii with not a lawyer in site.

Its the Redknappoly.
Warms the cockles...

* The remainder of this post (and all posts labelled #) are for subscribers only, and details the machinations in favour of Portsmouth winning the FA Cup last season.
Shame and Pity, not a Freedom of the City...

Our roster is now full for both Football Is Fixed and Dietrological.

© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological

Your Daily Dose Of Corruption #

Football Is Fixed is back after our wee holiday in a well-wet Glasgow.
We return with both new attitude and a rejigged strategy.
We are moving up a gear.
We mean business.

You will notice that ALL of the historical posts are being returned online at this site. This will take a few weeks but hopefully all will be revealed by our second birthday on November 11th.

Current posts will continue to be both daily and provocative.
Football Is Fixed - Your Daily Dose Of Corruption.
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Football has its last opportunity, in this current window, to save what remains of its integrity.
Football needs to build a foundation so that this great sport may be prevented from its slow metamorphosis into horse racing, with owners, managers, players and referees instead of owners, trainers, the institutions and jockeys pulling the levers of corruption.
Omnipresent during this corruption are the bookmakers.

Things have moved on.
One of the most critical aspects of taking a postmodernist perspective on society from an open source base point, is that one is able to influence the narratives at large in this society.
These narratives are not Real.
The current hyperreality of football bears no resemblance whatsoever to the sport taking place in your local park.
As such a fake entity, its existence is entirely dependent on the public being convinced of its validity and authenticity - think 'Simply Come Dancing', greyhound racing, soap operas, democracy, that sort of thing...
Some narratives may no longer be told in decent society. The Holocaust in Europe is now exported, via extraordinary rendition, to Third World locations where the narrative is most definitely still on the agenda.
As it is, of course, in the US and western Europe, it is merely that our Deep States have evolved enough to understand that it is now necessary to export such terrors to less regulated fake environments.
The same thing, incidentally, is happening with wage slavery...

I digress.

Because ScudamoreWorld is not Real, it is an easy entity to deconstruct.
The validity of the sport is virtually non-existent.
The results are affected by oodles of different, and often contrary, externalities ie betting money and insider corruptions.
Only the talent that is allowed onto the murky stage is buying the game some time.
If Robinho has a good match, showing us his considerable circus skills, this makes up for the fact that the match outcome was, in fact, pre-determined.
This will work for now.

But, look at horseracing. Apart from the meetings that involve rich people networking through a time warp, nobody goes. There may be great creatures racing, famous jockeys, minor celebrities showing off their narcissism via horserace ownership...
Still, nobody goes.

Buying a lottery ticket is invisible taxation, and, indeed, nowadays, one might be better simply popping down to Barclays and handing over your lottery money directly. Cut out the middle-person.
Buying into horseracing or football is simply 'invisible corruption' to the vast majority of spectators and viewers. Frequently, you will get the feeling that something 'doesn't feel quite right' about a game or a race, but without access to the betting patterns of the hidden private markets, you are not going to be able to determine the true hyperreality at play.

As the skullduggery in the banking sector has been exposed, there is a greater reluctance from the public to accept the calming words of our governments, our establishments, our media...
If an edifice as, apparently, well-regulated as the international financial markets is able to undertake the most massive corruptions imaginable without anybody lifting a finger to decelerate the process, just consider how easy it might be to perform similar corruptions in a sport like football.
There is virtually no concrete regulation.
It is a closed-shop.
There are very close links between the betting markets and the insiders in the industry - think Enron...
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Declan Hill has recently published a book called 'The Fix' exposing the corruption underpinning football as it appeared four years ago.
But the narrative that he creates is outdated.
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Just like derivatives...
The betting markets are derivative to the sport of football in the same manner as the derivatives markets are derivative to the financial system in the Great Poker Game.
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This ############################################################## corruption exists in a range of different territories. They all share a similar template - #############################################################################
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Vietnam, Italy, China, England, Russia, Thailand, Greece, Portugal, Germany, Brazil, Colombia, Australia, Finland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Singapore, Poland, Turkey, Israel etc etc etc.

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Firstly, the public are becoming increasingly less convinced by the rather obvious machinations.
For example, Rob Styles is ###################################################
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After his two high profile errors in the games between Man Utd and Bolton, and Newcastle and Man City, the PGMOB announce via ######################## Keith Hackett, that Styles was being stood down for the following round of matches.
In an Orwellian reality-twist of some magnitude, this doublespeak was from a very forked tongue.
Sure enough, Styles did not referee a game last weekend.
He got the 4th Official slot for the biggest game of the season so far, the battle between the Top Two, Chelsea and Liverpool.
What sort of demotion is this?
Where, exactly, is the justice being seen to be done?
Why aren't the referee ratings made by the clubs made public?
Is there a valid reason why the vast majority of Premiership matches are officiated by just 14 referees.
The one (one!!!????) Black official, Uriah Rennie, hasn't been given a single game this season.
Policeman, Howard Webb, has been given 11 matches in the 9 rounds of games (four as 4th Official). Seven of his events have been the high profile ###################################################### live Sky games.
Howard Webb was sent home early from Euro 2008 for his pitiful officiating in the Austria v Poland #####################################################

It is quite easy to put together an infrastructural template that would make corruption in the English Premiership considerably harder to enact.
These suggestions below are neither rocket science nor are they enough on their own to clean up the markets. Much more detailed scenario analysis and market analysis is required to achieve a robust template that would peripheralise the criminalities, and we do not wish to disclose such methods in this place.
But each of these suggestions would massively improve the game by putting the underworld and the market corruption people on the defensive.
It is all a matter of incentives.

* A roster of 100 referees, each getting a maximum of four games per year. There is no meritocracy in the selection of match officials by the PGMOB and the creation of a Select Group of just 20 referees is simply inviting corruption.
As we have stated before, Stuart Attwell is being fast-tracked to refereeing stardom, and this despite the illusory goal that he gave at Vicarage Road earlier in the season. If a bookmaker was able to 'get' Attwell then there are 25 years of control, at 25/30 games per season.
That is an awful lot of market control.
Would the bookies be so interested if a referee was only going to get between 1 and 4 games per season?

* Video technology and open source microphones. All other major sports are at least paying lip service to improving issues of integrity. Why is football so reluctant to get involved? Why don't they want to clean the game up?
Because football matches are determined, generally, by small integral differences ie one goal differential or level, the impact of the major decisions is critical. So, for example, Styles' sending off of Beye and the gift of a penalty to Abu Dhabi United was worth 1.60 of a goal. The farcical argument is always the one that technology is not 100% accurate.
And Rob Styles is?
The use of video replays would prevent the frequent miscarriages of justice that so enrage the target audience.
The open source microphones will allow us to listen in to the interactions between 4th Official and the referee. This is particularly important as Keith Hackett has now determined that referees should repeatedly work with the same assistants.
Oh my gosh, yet another template primed for corruption emanating from the PGMOB.

* Create disincentives to gamble. Global regulation of the betting markets and lifetime bans for anyone found operating or trading in private underground markets. Proper sousveillance bodies need to be set up to monitor the betting markets as the current bodies are under the influence of the betting industry.
I am able to prove, for example, that all 10 matches in the Premiership round the weekend-before-last, were impacted upon by the influence of betting money.
We traded on this information and won handsomely and repeatedly.
Why are the industry bodies established to police these hyperrealities unable to detect these patterns, when they have even more information than we do?

* The avoidance of fake entities being established on non-sustainable debt. We currently have a person, Richard Scudamore, in charge of the Premier League who is an avid believer in the free markets and in the importance of the linkages between the betting markets and the sport.
Throughout the world of shareholder capitalism, there are clear examples of the perils of a boom-and-bust abusive template, but Scudamore, in his un-wisdom, believes that the £3 billion worth of debt is sustainable and that people will continue to pay out for the sub-standard product that he has created.
Not in a Depression, they won't, pal...

* A proper fit-and-proper-persons test (FPPT) to avoid individuals with very close links to underground betting markets owning #######################################, for example.
I know, for an absolute fact, that a certain ################################## very very close links with the underground betting industry in ###################
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* The murky world of agents must be cleaned up. From the illicit slave trades of South America and West Africa to agents representing both player and club in a transfer transaction, this area of the game must be better regulated.
Additionally, much of the linkage between the underworld betting markets and rogue players is undertaken by the agents. Players receive up to £1 million per match of which the agents take their slice.

We mentioned above that football in its current form is merely a figment of your realities.
We do not need to accept this version of the sport.
There are now a grouping of us who are working together to create the impetus for a different sport, proper football.
At UEFA, in the government, at the FA, there are people who we are able to work with.
There are selected journalists, some betting market insiders, ##############, #############################, ##########################, Declan Hill, several Asian bookmakers and a whole load of people whose incentives will flip fully 180 degrees as the full extent of ScudamoreWorld's Can Of Worms starts to be revealed in the coming months.

We are no longer in this alone.
As I said...
...Time to move up a gear.

Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to subscribers only.

© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological

If You Don't Tell Them, They'll Never Know

Some quotes and bits to keep you happy, while I am on holiday.
Football Is Fixed returns to its Daily Format next Tuesday.

Thaksin Shinawatra is spinning his innocence, after being found guilty in the first of six cases standing against him in Thailand. By a 5-4 majority, His Excellency was sentenced in absentia to two years in jail over a corrupt land deal.
His wife was acquitted in a 7-2 verdict.
His Excellency claims that the sentencing is politically motivated.
His narrow 'defeat' and his wife's acquittal might suggest otherwise.
The British government should bear this in mind when decisions are made about extradition.
Richard Scudamore should bear this in mind when he weasels his way to a justification for Shinawatra still being able to hold a 25 % stake in Manchester City.

And, in that Ben Bernanke is brown-nosing his way towards a further three-quarters of a trillion dollars of government handout, the FT suggests that we are having the michael taken: "The US authorities are, perhaps, being kinder to bankers than is politically prudent."
These are not bailouts.
They are handouts.
Banks will not lend to each other while the Toxic Monster is still at large.

Declan Hill has written an excellent book, "The Fix", about how football USED TO be corrupted.
The current template is not to be found within its pages.
Good read though...
"The fixing has destroyed the credibility of these [Asian] leagues. Across the continent, the attendance at matches has collapsed, the FIFA rankings of the teams are declining and so the fans and the bettors have turned their attention to Europe."

While the financial world was imploding, New Labour nipped into spin mode, the standard tactic of bury away the bad news beneath the really really bad news. The Minister for the Police State, Jacqui Smith announced that we should look forward to intercepts on all of our communications as the Deep State seeks to look after our interests by confronting those pesky terrorists.
A couple of points, if Psycho-Blair had not launched his illegal wars, there would be no fear of terror - even Stella Rimington can see that.
Secondly, in a country of getting on for 5 million CCTV cameras, phone-taps, email filtering, internet usage monitoring, would it not make some sense developing equivalent surveillance techniques so that we might prevent a repeat of the scurrilous antisocial behaviours that underpin the banking scandal from ever being repeated again?

My long-dead Grandad: "If you don't tell them, they'll never know."

© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological

You Snivelling Little Shysters... #

We were greeted with some degree of incredulity when we stated yesterday that we had traded correctly on ALL the weekend's Premiership matches.
Oh ye of little faith...

Last week, I went inside the House of Commons for the first time.
In my earlier years, I did do mock-goose steps past Thatcher's blue hordes outside the building on various CND marches, but the inside was a bit of a laugh.
Although getting past security was entertaining...

The reason that the people who are concerned with the integrity of the game are talking with us, and we have been in contact with a couple of people for over 2 years now, is that we are FULLY aware of the Real Corruption taking place in England's top league.

Below are the filtered advices that we sent out to either our Dietrological Platinum or our Dietrological clients this weekend.
There are no available slots for either of these services.

Middlesboro v Chelsea - We do not agree with the gamble on Boro and prefer Chelsea
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Arsenal v Everton - We prefer Arsenal and we understand that there is an individual ######################################################################### #############################################################
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Aston Villa v Portsmouth - ######################################################
###############################################. I am not allowed to talk about this game but, if I had no choice other than to choose one team or the other, I'd go for +0.5 on Portsmouth. This is very very hot. ###################################################################
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Bolton Wanderers v Blackburn Rovers - Bolton are compromised by #################
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The late market has moved to Half-Ball. There has to be value in Rovers at those levels.
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Fulham v Sunderland - We prefer Sunderland with +0.0,0.5 start ###################
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Liverpool v Wigan - Nearly as hot as Villa v Pompey - always the same individuals, even if they vary the markets where they corrupt the events. ##################
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Manchester United v West Bromwich Albion - Draw at Half-Time/ Man Utd at Full Time. Although there is increasingly less mileage in this particular market inefficiency, the bookies require it today. ###############################################
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Hull City v West Ham United - Back Hull City at Draw No Bet on A/H. ##################################################################- Low Level.

Stoke City v Tottenham - Back Stoke +0.5 on A/H - Medium/Low Level. #############
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Newcastle United v Manchester City - Buy City at Draw No Bet. The reasoning for taking the skinny price is obvious. There is a lot of professional money against Newcastle because they are rubbish. But we all are aware that there are possible machinations against our interests. We are VERY concerned about ################
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9 Winning Positions.
1 Breakeven.
Only Richard Dunne's rather inventive input preventing the Perfect 10.

And the reason people are talking with us?
Only one of these matches wasn't rigged in one way or another.
Its your game.
You should care.

Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to subscribers only.

© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological

IdioTic - The Role Of IT In The Financial Crisis

Lyotard: "How do you prove the proof? Who decides the conditions of truth?"

The restricted spectrum of knowledge is at the foundation of our current hyperrealities - the biggest crisis yet for the capitalist system.
In order to optimise the efficiencies for the elite operators in the global financial system, knowledge has been restricted, repackaged and sold as a new knowledge, a technological knowledge.
And, as Lyotard said: "Technology is therefore a game pertaining not to the true, the just or the beautiful, etc but to efficiency."

Postmodernists view society as a "giant machine".
Our educations are contorted to fit in with the requirements of this machine.
It is no longer necessary to learn about the macro subjects, Real knowledge, as these subjects have no role in the machine.
Out goes Real History, Real Philosophy, Real Mathematics, Real Science and Real Languages and, instead, we are taught Business Studies, IT, Marketing, Media Studies, Cybernetics, Political Science and Government, Economics and Commerce.

"There are potentially two sorts of knowledge. One, the positivist kind would be directly applicable to technologies bearing on men and materials, and would lend itself to operating as an indispensable productive force within the system. The other is the critical, reflexive or hermeneutic kind - by reflecting directly or indirectly on values or aims, would resist any such 'recuperation'" - Lyotard, again.

Cybernetics are at the core of this hyperreality.
Because the global financial system is based on only a few teetering blocks of foundation stone, any analysis of these bases has to form a major part of any market analysts' armoury.
The pseudo-reality is self-fulfilling.
By imposing an autistic and psychopathic template on the system, the financial architects define the rules of engagement - we enter this distorted reality to determine their methods and aims, and then we depart to more holistic pastures as soon as is reasonably possible.

The cybernetic matrix has several core defining properties.
Firstly, maximisation and optimisation of the performativity of the financial system is the creed. All decisions are made in deference to the critical input-output ratio and to matters of efficiency.
Secondly, the cybernetic template is primed for corruption, and not just by its basic feature of rewarding the most antisocial behaviours in the marketplace. Through the establishment of an IT-based template, insiders, institutional power and the speculators are able to game the mathematical and statistical elements to proprietary benefit. The cybernetic structure provides, effectively, a closed system - numerous parameters that should have a relevance and a weighting are, instead, externalised.

With respect to the current crisis, these points are key.
All decisions related to the meltdown of the late phase of shareholder capitalism are made in deference to the markets exposing the greatest liquidities.
Credit derivatives define the creative decisions.
All lip service paid to lower tiers of the global financial system are simply that, lip service.
Crises are recurrent in capitalism, and the crises will always be more impactful at the lower levels of the system because any remedies prescribed are not targeting these strata, being focused entirely on the needs of the players at the Great Capitalist Poker Game that casts an ominous shadow over our economies and, indeed, our planetary eco-system.

Such an abusive template is a difficult sell.
Lyotard: "The state spends a large amount of money to enable science to pass itself off as an epic: the state's own credibility is based on that epic, which it uses to obtain the public consent which decision makers need... The sign of legitimacy is the people's consensus."

But the science of shareholder capitalism is a pseudo-science, an utter mockery of scientific principles.
Economics has no rules, no theory, it is not replicable under new circumstances, historical measurements have no value in any current assessment of the subject, there isn't even the groundings for a scientific hypothesis.
The Dismal Science is, in fact, The Dismal UnScience.
For most people in the world, it is simply Dismal...
Lyotard: "The subject of knowledge is not the people, but the speculative spirit."

Economics, when translated into the cybernetic world of arbitrage and hedging and the parcelling and selling and reselling of risk and debt, is a multi-disciplinary high stakes gambling medium.
This is not science.

We use cybernetics in our analyses of markets because the forms of analysis dovetail perfectly with the hyperrealities of the financial system. Fuzzy logic, neural networks and some fiendishly clever algorithms have been created to gain an edge in our trading activities in all marketplaces.
We do not believe in these analytical forms as a pure knowledge - they are merely adaptations to a matrix of fake knowledge and fake realities that define our postmodern world.
For example, our neural nets are extremely robust - up to 20% of our trading is based on these software creations. We game the pseudo-reality through laterally-thought inputs and train up the software to spot patterns in the underlying data. These patterns provide profit from the inefficiencies in the market, almost exclusively established by the gaming of the markets by those in positions of power.
This is not knowledge.
This is not science.
This is gaming.

A good way to consider knowledge is to think of a bicycle wheel, with numerous spokes emanating from the centre of the wheel. Each segment so developed may be regarded as an area of knowledge.
Postmodern shareholder capitalism, the states that are part of the project and the media who are there to provide disinformation merely look at one of these segments. All of the other areas of knowledge are superfluous to the performance of the capitalist entity.

By restricting knowledge to such a small area of the complete continuum of knowledge, we have established a mass of stupidity.
For, not only is the vast majority of knowledge discarded as being of no importance to the efficiencies of the marketplace, but also, the cybernetic and IT-based methods utilised to define these hyperrealities are, at best, simplistic and, at worst, idiotic.
We constantly have to resist pressure from computer nerds who think that their restrictive vision of the world has some relevance.
To a person, these individuals have a great failing - the inability to conceptualise and create holistic real-time structures that define the hyperrealities at play.
They think that they get it and we don't.
We think that they are "... those hyperbrains glued to their computers which, though already considerably underused, diminish themselves even more by having a machine function in their stead" - Jean Baudrillard.

And, it is these gross idiocies that enable the machinations of the grotesque abuses that have to be perpetrated in order to maintain this system.

This weekend, we applied our vast range of analytical methods to the corrupt world of the English Premiership.
We traded on all nine games.
Every stance was based on a holistic view of the corruptions in the market.
All of our trades won.
This seems to me a little bit of a waste of life, really.
I'd much rather be studying Cosmology...

We finish today with a statement from James Mitchell, Professor of Physics at the Université de Rennes I: "Many of the mathematical models used in banking were created by scientifically skilled young people who were lured into the banking industry because they could not get those kinds of salaries (and prestige) in research laboratories. Banks have taken much of the cream of the scientific talent in America and Europe, and to what end? The rush to increase profits has come to naught and in many cases led to financial disaster. Imagine what those young people could have done if they had chosen careers in science and medicine. What innovations might have resulted? What breakthroughs might have been achieved? Instead they were used to create a false financial system that is ruinous for our countries."

© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological

There Is No Tomorrow #

"What have I done to deserve to be hit by something thrown by a coward and a moron?" - Harry Redknapp after a 50p coin hit an assistant referee at Villa Park yesterday.

As Mr Redknapp was speaking after yet another ################################################################################### ###########################################################################
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"I haven't done anything wrong" said the man who is still being investigated along with other officers of his club over the bungs inquiry and associated issues of fraud and money laundering, the man who manages a club that is illegally run by Arkadi Gaydamak, an Israeli politician with a French arrest warrant for illegal arms dealing hanging over his head, the man who is known #########################
#####################################################################, the man who is manager, and is therefore responsible, for Portsmouth being the biggest ######### ################################################## in English football.
Apart from that, we cannot think of anything that Mr Redknapp has done wrong.

Although, the man must also bear some responsibility for the idiocies emanating from the mouth of his son, Jamie " I believe that, I really do, I really do believe it, I really do, I believe it" Redknapp.

Portsmouth have extensive financial difficulties due to Arkadi wishing to sell his asset, Redknapp's debt-based transfer policies, and the small ground reducing match day revenues.

In ScudamoreWorld, debt is a good thing.
This is because debt creates need, and need opens doors to the murky underworld that is destroying the great sport of football.
Massive liquidity from insider sources have existed on recent Portsmouth matches. Check out the details that we provided to our Dietrological clients pre-match on just a couple of the games:

Aston Villa v Portsmouth - ################################################# a massive corrupt market. I am not allowed to talk about this game but, if I had no choice other than to choose one team or the other, I'd go for +0.5 on Portsmouth. This is very very hot. ########################################################
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Man City v Portsmouth - Major insider gambling event. We would ##################
####################################### prefer City on A/H.

Football is about to implode, massively but partially.

There will be an entity in existence following the fallout from the tsunami of truth that is about to surface, but the erosion of trust, the breaking of the bond between the Real fan and the game will be broken for ever.
The formation of AFC Liverpool in parallel to FC United of Manchester is the future direction - we were astonished at the strength of reaction to our musings about the setting up of a FC Celtic of Glasgow, one correspondent has even suggested that we get Chic Charnley as manager!
Real People don't want debt-ridden private bodies owned by the murky and the dodgy.
They desire Proper Football.
Hyperreal People, on the other hand, have no idea what they want, as they have no idea where they stand on any social, political or societal issue...

Following the news that the Norwich City versus Derby County game was fixed for proprietary financial gain, the industry has moved into overdrive to cover their tracks, while denying that there were any tracks to be covered in the first place.

We mentioned the corrupt nonsense uttered by Scarface yesterday.
Scarface reckons five or six players would be needed to throw a game.
Scarface is either several sandwiches short of a picnic, or he is telling you porkies...

When ################## was deliberately underperforming for #############, he undertook his on-field machinations of his own volition. By making fake runs, poor passes, missing the target at a level that suggested an aversion to goalposts, he controlled the match outcomes. #####################'s career was nearly destroyed by having to play alongside a serial non-trier.
One player on the pitch and one market contact off the pitch is all that is required for massive manipulations to replace a magnificent match.

Following news that three more games are under investigation, two Premiership and Accrington Stanley v Bury, the defenders of the indefensible have been producing press releases like there is no tomorrow, which, is quite astute as there is going to be 'no tomorrow' for the current level of criminality.

The Association of British Bookmakers claim that there were no suspicious betting patterns on the Norwich v Derby game, which kind of flies in the face of the fact that the corruption was exposed by Spreadex, a British firm. The money surfaced across the planet at Half Time, not just the Philippines.
Which also makes the claim of the European Sports Security Association, that nothing untoward went on, rather myopic, at best, or murky, at worst.

What are these people looking at?
Yesterday, we traded on every Premiership game.
Every single match was manipulated in one way or another for the benefit of a range of participants in the betting markets.
EVERY SINGLE MATCH...
Not the two Premiership games in the last 6 years that the FA is currently trying to avoid investigating.
We are supreme at the moment in our trading.
Every Premiership trade won yesterday.
We were basing our betting, to a significant extent, on the corruptions at play.
If these matches were not externally corrupted, we would not be repeatedly correct.
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Following the fallout of the East Anglian Affair, Roy Carroll was left out of Derby's team for yesterday's match with Plymouth - it was Carroll who gave away the penalty and got himself sent off in the allegedly rigged game.
His manager had claimed that Derby had nothing to do with the affair, which makes the dropping of the man at the centre of the controversy an unusual mode of behaviour.
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The authorities and the criminals share one common theme - the desire to prevent these machinations reaching the public eye - no exposure prevents Reality from trumping Hyperreality.

The individual who broke news of the matches under investigation by the FA states: "I went to the FA with one of these games 2 years ago. It took them 4 months to come back to me, even though I could have furnished them with all the information the following day. When they did get back to me, I found there was little they could do - they didn't have the jurisdiction. That's why I think it is a matter for the police."

Of course, this was before Lord Triesman's time and we should still trust that Triesman and Burnham are sincere in ridding the game of its criminal underworld.
The war between the FA/government and ScudamoreWorld is only just beginning.
Scudamore is leaking information about Triesman's Communist Party Past.
We should be far more concerned with Richard Scudamore's Psychopathic Present.

These games only came to light due to 'unexplained' betting swings in the Asian market.
The focus is always on Asia.

Check out the conversation below from Declan Hill's book "The Fix":

Hill: You can’t bribe a player in a European league, they get paid too much money…

Fixer: That is a common mistake. People see the amount of money that is paid in transfer fees but that does not go to the players.
You have to approach their agents, that is the way to get to the players. Say they get £50,000 a week. Then we offer them £150,000 for an hour and half’s work. Do you think they will turn that down? It is very easy to get them to say yes.
But all the leagues in the world, EPL, Champions League, World Cup, they can be fixed. I had players on XXXX, XXXX and XXXX [names three EPL teams]. You say these are great teams? They are --------. We can bribe them.
You think because the clubs make big money in the transfer, that it means that the players won’t take a bribe. That is not true. They will take the money.

Hill: It must be difficult for you to approach English players though?

Fixer: Yes, I have heard that the English gangs are now trying to fix EPL games.
In the last four to five years the Englishman comes to Asia.
The Asians taught them how to fix games. One time they wanted to meet me but I refused. They are doing the same thing in boxing and rugby.

Meanwhile Gordon Taylor, Mr Big at the Professional Players Federation, misses the point entirely: "We need strong links between the betting firms and the sporting bodies."

NO WE DO NOT!
This is what we already have.

What we need is global regulation to prevent insider and insider-linked betting on football matches, we need independent assessment of video replays, we need referees to be selected meritocratically rather than murkily, we need for the corrupt individuals to be removed from the game and, preferably, from society, #######
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Is football fixed?
Is the pope a former member of the Hitler youth?
Get Real.

Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to subscribers only.

© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological

Fill The Car, Buy A Star #

Noel Gallagher: "Every time a Manchester United fan fills up with petrol, he'll be financing our transfers."

But not so much as just a couple of months ago - OPEC are thinking of reducing supply to bolster an oil price that has fallen by more than 50%.
A monopoly, market distortion, speculation, gaming the global economy for proprietary advantage - it must be the free markets at play once again.

So, how is the hyperreality of ScudamoreWorld facing up to onset of the Depression?
Lets have a progress report to remind ourselves of where the fuck we are currently located in the ScudamoreWorld Simulacrum.

Next week, we release the Second Part of our exclusive interviews with a leading Far East Football Broker, but for now, you need to be brought up to speed.

* Norwich City v Derby County was not a Premiership game, yet the outcome of the FA inquiry into events in East Anglia on October 4th will increase pressure on the chief executive of the Premier League, Richard Scudamore.
To recap, unusual betting patterns were detected at Half Time in the match. Derby led 1-0 at the interval but bets linked to the Phillipines entirely distorted the market. Five minutes into the Second Half, Roy Carroll gave away a penalty and got himself sent off to boot.
1-1, 40 minutes on the clock, 11 v 10 with the ten men having a reserve keeper between the posts. The scam went wrong. Nathan Ellington scored for the ten men of Derby with a few minutes remaining.

We have to be careful what we say here...
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90% of Premiership football matches are fixes or attempts-at-fixes.
This is not news.

* The Global Financial Meltdown is having massive impacts on the game across the world - witness the recent rounds of World Cup Qualifiers (we'll be preparing a hindsight post in the near future, but our Dietrological clients will understand what we are talking about).
We isolate West Ham and Newcastle below but elsewhere there are repeated structures of uncertainty.
Arsenal - Usmanov, Kroenke, pseudo-lockdowns, the refusal of the Premier League to allow them to compete on a level playing field;
Liverpool - Hicks v Gillett, Wachovia;
Chelsea - The Russian stockmarket has lost 60% of its value of late; termination if Abramovich walks away;
Man Utd - AIG on life support, no waiting list for season tickets, linkage to the Tevez affair, need to win Premiership and Champions League to breakeven, merchandise sales will fall in Depression;
Portsmouth - #########################################################, stretched financially due to Redknapp's transfer policies; bungs inquiry in the area;
Bolton Wanderers - Have large amounts of money wrapped up in the frozen Icelandic banking system.
Across the board, Premiership clubs have close links with the banking sector - nine clubs are linked to Barclays, for instance. With systemic risk being the issue of the day, there should be some very creative reordering of assets and debts being undertaken.

* The sides are being drawn up behind the government/FA and the underworld/Premier League. Sir Richards is refusing to sit on the 2018 World Cup Panel. Scudie is not talking to the good Lord. Andy Burnham has come with seven rules to knock some sense into the game. The elite are squaring up for a scrap...

* Problems remain with the PGMOB Select Group of match officials. Mark Clattenburg remains banned; ###############################################################
#############################################################; the last round of matches saw rampant changing of referees and assistants with a total of 14 alterations causing chaos in the betting markets; there is dissent in the refereeing ranks with one official saying: ###############
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* There are outstanding issues that may well feedback into English/British football. Among the most difficult to hide away are the alleged buying of the UEFA Cup by Zenit Leningrad last season, the rebounding of this story into Glasgow, the FA's lack of jurisdiction over betting that occurs outside Britain, the fixed England v Ecuador World Cup match etc etc

* West Ham United are likely to go out of business in the near future. With up to £50 million worth of liabilities being the likely outcome of the final Griffiths Report in February 2009, a sell off of players is needed to offset the financial crisis being experienced by the Icelandic consortium and Bjorngolfur Gudmundsson. Nobody will purchase an entity in such distress when the entire financial system is in chaos. Sheffield United are securing their cash by taking out an injunction against any Hammers appeal to the CAS.
The Iceman are claiming interest from Dubai, which was denied. West Ham should have done their homework before releasing fake press releases, Dubai Financial Markets have lost 50% of their value this year, and Dubai is currently a poor neighbour to Abu Dhabi.

* Newcastle's only saving grace is their stadium, otherwise they would be reforming as an amateur outfit. The ####################### has seen 90% of his fortune wiped out since February, and each day it just gets worser and worser. He has a toxic club, with legal threats overhanging from former manager, Kevin Keegan.
We have been reliably informed that there are, in fact, NO serious buyers out there.
No interest whatsoever.
And every week, the ################################ sees his money gushing away...

80% of Sumo wrestling matches are fixed, the audience has fallen away and public interest has wained.
80% of British horseraces are fixed, the audience has fallen away and public interest has wained.
90% of Premiership matches are fixed, the audience are not going to continue paying £100 per game live or £50 per month for television for a discredited product.

Your nightmare has returned, Scudamore.

Four quotes to terminate today's offering...
The first comes from Alan Hansen, a man who we know was aware of the recent rigged ##################################### game: "To attempt to fix a game in the Premier League with the kind of spotlight that is on football now would be a daunting task simply because of the level of scrutiny... [it would] need a minimum of five or six players to do it."

Football Is Fixed: "To fix a game in the Premiership with the lack of spotlight that is on football now would be a facile task simply because of the lack of scrutiny... [it would] only need ###########################################################
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UEFA spokesperson: "So it would certainly be worrisome if organised crime... had got as far as the Championship in England."

Football Is Fixed: "What? Even more worrisome than Zenit St Petersburg buying the UEFA Cup Semi Finals and Final, or 90% of Premiership matches being rigged in one way or another?"

Planet Earth calling...

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© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological

Xmas Eve In A Lunatic Asylum #

In Britain, neither ice dancing nor ballroom dancing were popular pastimes, until spectacularised vulgar hyperrealities were marketed on prime-time Saturday night television.

Now, we have John Barnes, 'Strictly Come Dancing Participant and Former Professional Footballer', like the weaving run and goal against Brazil never took place.

We await Ant & Dec thrilling us with Sumo Wrestling In Drag, and other activities more suited to xmas eve in a lunatic asylum.

Football and the International Financial Markets (IFMs) are also a hyperreal lunatic asylum.
They exist in a state that bears no links to the original concept of their creation - football did not start off as a sport whose match outcomes are determined by the input of the gambling sector, and IFMs were not originally intended as platforms for high stakes poker on an existential plane.

Strictly Come Dancing, Sumo Wrestling In Drag, ScudamoreWorld, The Credit Derivatives Casino - these are fake realities.

New Labour is hyperreal too.
New Labour nationalised Northern Rock inexpertly, further damaging the banks' creditworthiness in the process.
New Labour, in the form of its nationalised financial arm, is turfing large numbers of mortgage holders out of their properties as negative equity and the Recession/Depression take hold.
New Labour has handed over, in theory, £500 billion to the banking sector - as we said the other day, £13,000 for every taxpayer in the country.
New Labour thinks that one person who is unemployed is the financial equivalent of 1/10 billionth of the banking bailout.
New Labour, Old Tories...

And this bailout, like all the other financial sector bailouts globally, is simply a handout. It will prop up the balance sheets of the banks and insurance companies in the short term, while normal people will receive absolutely no benefit whatsoever - think Northern Rock and your home...
While the Monster in the Deep, the toxicity of Credit Derivatives, still exists, no financial institution is going to open itself up to the risk of importing some of this toxicity.
So banks will continue to shun one another, they have no need of their competitors anymore, they have a state-based economic system to fall back on instead.

The core obscenity in this systemic scam doesn't relate to the regressive redistribution of taxpayers money to the architects of the Crisis, for that has always been the way of the world.
The core obscenity is this...
... The decisions that are being made, allegedly on our behalf, by those that we have elected into power, and those, like Hank Paulson, who have elected themselves into power, are not even being made for the good of the globalised economy that they apparently have such a belief in.
The decisions are being made to protect the balance of chips possessed by the individual players in the Credit Derivatives Poker Game which is the financial activity which is at the peak of our pyramid selling system.

This is what shareholder capitalism has evolved into - a Psychopathic Poker Game.
The Wall Street Trillion, rather than the Ladbrokes Million.

When Paulson saved AIG rather than Lehman Brothers, his decision process was not only influenced by his linkage to Lehman's competitor, Goldman Sachs. If AIG's derivatives positions had unravelled, then contagion and feedback loops would have negatively impacted to a massive extent on the hyperwealth of the other participants at the Psychopathic Poker Table.
Any assessment of the impacts on the Real economy didn't even enter Paulson's mind - remember he never even mentioned the 3.6 million repossessed homes in the US in his original three page plea for some more poker chips for the game.

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And the eventual bailout will lead to hyperinflation as governments are forced to print copious amounts of money to keep the Psychopathic Poker game running.
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Tony Benn: "'The great inter-war slumps were not acts of God or of blind forces. They were the sure and certain result of the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men. These men had only learned how to act in the interest of their own bureaucratically-run private monopolies which may be likened to totalitarian oligarchies within our democratic state, They had and they felt no responsibility to the nation.'
These words are from the 1945 Labour manifesto Let Us Face The Future which brilliantly identified the very same crisis which is now described as a "credit crunch" as if it were a mere hiccup in an otherwise wonderful neo-liberal globalised world which could be corrected with a vast subsidy from the taxpayers to put the Wall Street casino and its partners worldwide back into profit. It reminded me of the fact that when slavery was abolished it was the slave owners, and not the slaves, who received compensation from the government of the day.
Perhaps more important - and never mentioned in the media - is that all the news we get every day and every hour is all about the bankers while presidents, prime ministers and other elected leaders of the world have been reduced to the role of mere commentators who are expected to supply taxpayers' money whenever it is needed to bail out the wealthy.
... Trade union rights are now more restricted than they were in 1906, wages have been held down and people have been advised to borrow and spend as an alternative - which explains why the stock market has fallen and locked more and more people into debt, which is a subtle form of slavery itself."

What a pity that there appears to nobody in New Labour who is even remotely linked to the original Reality of Labour.

The onset of the Depression, in the hyperreal media world, is marketed and branded as 'Saving The System'.
This is an erroneous template for consideration.
What we are actually dealing with here, girls and boys, is "Saving A System".

The psychopathic post-shareholder capitalist monstrosity is not the only system that we have on the table.
And, in comparison with the alternatives, does it warrant being saved?

There goes our cash.
There goes your system.

Capitalism goes Chernobyl, which seems pretty apt as the Ukraine is about to become the next country to be declared bankrupt - we bet strongly that the US doesn't allow Russia to rush in and save Kyiv, as they permitted with the bankruptcy of Iceland last week!!!

But lets think outside the box, perhaps Hank Paulson is, in Reality, the ultimate environmentalist - after all he loves trees, its only human beings that he has an aversion to.
If Hanky Panky keeps deconstructing the global financial sector so meticulously that the system collapses under the weight of its own inconsequence, climate change will be addressed via Direct Action at the financial core of the system.

Finally for today, we are able to take control of this process on one primary level.

Tax.
No taxation without representation is the cry.
If an unemployed person is worth the financial equivalent of 1/10 billionth of the British banking sector, then we are not being represented by our government.
The government is, instead, representing the interests of the financial sector and other strata's of the deep state apparatus in our state-based economy.

If you are already self-employed, excellent, creative accounting together with our proposal set out below, will remove you from the ravages of the taxation system.
If you are unemployed, ditto.
If you are in employment, then there is a high probability that you won't be for much longer, as the Depression begins to truly nibble away at the fake edifice. So, you are about to quantum into an unemployed state, anyway...

Swapping, that's the key.
We could sell highly privileged inside information relating to the football betting markets to an IT consultant, charge VAT, and pay tax on our earnings come the end of the financial year. We could ensure that we have all the peripherals that come with the system, accountants, auditors, consultants, tax advisers, even down to the micro-peripherals like the cost of maintaining ledgers in time and stationery.
And some of our 100 hundred hours a week of labour would then be utilised to keep bankers and wankers in the yachting world that they are used to.

OR, we could GIVE highly privileged inside information relating to the football betting markets to an IT consultant, and, in return, he could prepare us some extensive databases for our cybernetic software programmes, or design a new platform for the Football Is Fixed blog, or help my Romanian colleagues to hack into ########
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No Cash. No Crisis.

This matrix may be extended to life outside work - gardening, bicycle repair, plumbing, yoga classes, Qi Gong, veterinary skills, grocery, etc etc.
You simply have to work out a suitable exchange rate by bartering in a socially responsible manner. No finance, no middle people, no bureaucracy, no stress, no tax.

Freedom, in fact.

There is no point in maintaining any faith in this shareholder capitalist system.
If you are still buying into it, you are deluding yourselves.
Your savings will disappear, your pensions too, it is surely better to be planning a parallel social economy of negative growth and bottom-up democracy.

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© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological

Batter A Banker; A Happy Slapping For Hanky Panky #

Well, we told you that the bounce was illusory, and following the hyperreal hysteria harrumphing around on Monday, yesterday the Dow Jones experienced its biggest daily loss (in percentage terms) since Black Monday 1987.
The FTSE 100 also lost over 7%, leaving both exchanges virtually at the same level as they were at Friday's close (after the worst ever week in Wall Street's history).

For goodness sake, San Francisco's Federal Reserve Bank President, Jan Yellen, even used the 'R' word on Monday evening, when she said that the US was already in recession.

The media control of the 'R' word has been a feature of the onset of the Depression over the last weeks, as the financial media have realised that the only way to save the system is to convince traders and investors that things are not as bad as they seem.
Of course, things are worse than they seem, as we point out below, but Bloomberg, the Financial Times and the Economist have all been seeking a silver lining to the reappearance of the Monster from the Deep.
But, at least the BBC has got its finger on the pulse.
Some Victorian throwback spoke from my radio the other day: "Has anything shocking ever happened to you at a literary festival?"

In Britain, unemployment is rapidly approaching two million and, as in the US, any saunter around a suburban shopping street will reveal numerous boarded up shopfronts and closing-down-sale signs.
Britain is becoming a nation of failed shopkeepers...
And this is only the first phase of the Depression.

As ever, this Crisis comes down to an understanding of the magnitude of figures. The Financial Criminals who have played Global Poker with all of our existences depend, to a large extent, on the vast majority of people not being able to comprehend either the machinations of the financial system or the levels of financial liquidity involved.
This is one of the primary reasons that we always attempt to provide comparative figures, in order to bring these operatives and their hyperrealities into our spheres of understanding.

So, in response to the largest increase in unemployment figures for 17 years, the British government has stumped up £100 million for training programmes.
Indeed, in a Tebbittian moment, Gordon Brown suggested that the unemployed should lag roofs.
New Labour...

Anyway, £100 million for training.
2 million unemployed by xmas = £50 quid each.
Just what level of training is our great leader proposing here?

The total banking package established by the marginally competent Mr Brown may well reach £500 billion.
So the New Labour government has clearly demonstrated where its sympathies lie, as each unemployed person will receive training at 1/10 billionth of the total set aside for the British banks.
That is your worth when you are on the dole.
The banking sector to human ratio is 10,000,000,000:1.

But these totals will change as the Crisis begins to really bite.
Already, leading investment boutiques and some of the banks themselves are saying that the massive bailout is not enough, and that the conditions are not allowing a carte blanche for future psychopathic revenue growth.
They are going to be coming back asking for more.
Wasn't one of the key factors in the US $700 billion bailout, its one-off nature?
Well, that is how Hanky Panky sold it to us...

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Having provided soft payments to the investment banks, he oversaw the demise of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, the takeover of Merrill Lynch by the Bank of America.
The two remaining investment banks, Goldman and Morgan Stanley, were restructured as retail banks, neatly gaming the new financial hyperrealities to their primary advantages.
And also avoiding any questions regarding duopolistic sectors...
Warren Buffett was certainly impressed with Paulson's deconstruction of the system on behalf of Goldman Sachs, for he invested $5 billion in the bank - bottom-buying a market controller is the fundamental trading strategy for Berkshire Hathaway.

Having sorted out the investment banking sector, Paulson turned his steely gaze to another of Goldman Sachs' areas of competition - the hedge funds.
As we posted the other day, hedge funds had their second worst month ever in September, and Credit Suisse are predicting that one-third of hedge funds will go bust in the next two years.
Paulson's ban on the short-selling of over 900 financial stocks was the weapon of choice, for hedge funds are dependent on shorting for their profits.
Furthermore, this tactic was a double whammy.
Not only did the ban prevent hedge funds from creating future profits, it cornered them in their current market positions.
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The hedge funds are taking a battering, particularly as their much more speculative positions on oil are coming unstuck big style too - oil is at 50% of its peak price.
Speculation on a cartel, from outside the firewall of the said cartel, is simply gambling.

And it is gambling that defines the infrastructural hyperreality of the Depression.

In 1998, Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) was losing over $1 billion per month and the fund folded in 2000.
And why does this matter?
For two reasons...
Firstly, LTCM included, as board members, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton who had shared the 1997 Nobel Prize for Economics for their work on Options.
Their analytical talents were allegedly prescience, the ability to predict future price levels, but the US government had to bailout LTCM due to a complete absence of this one core skill.
Secondly, the reason that the government was required was because of the fear of contagion if LTCM had been allowed to go belly up. Exactly the same reasoning was behind Paulson's double rescue of those party-loving-people at AIG.

These two points are key to the next, and much more turbulent phase of this Crisis.

I'd like to paint you a picture in the narrative here.
Here, on planet earth, we have the Real economy, the informal economy, people repairing exhausts on cars, plumbers, gardeners, teachers, bloggers, roof laggers, that sort of thing, the sort of stuff that actually Really affects the lives of normal people.
On an entirely different level, we have the Hyperreality of Global Finance.
This is effectively a massively liquid poker game.
With $600 trillion of credit derivatives being notionally outstanding at any given time, the stakes in this poker game are considerable.
In fact, the stakes are over 11 times greater than the total annual global output of the Real economy.
Now, poker games are dependent on short-term strategy, bluff, deceit, public perceptions and, very usually, a rigged table with some player(s) and/or dealer(s) gaming the gambling experience.

Every time a poker player does the Tony Bloom thing and self destructs, the financial loss is simply personal.
In the world of credit derivatives, this is not the case.
When a leading player bluffs and is called by the other market participants, the liabilities of the loss will fall back on the Real economy.
LTCM was bad enough at $4.6 billion, but what if larger players went under, and contagion took hold, and feedback loops both within and outside the sector come into play?
The liabilities will be beyond anything that any government is able to establish.

Allowing psychopathic gamblers to trade with our existences at these massive levels of liquidity is an obscene outrage.
And they have no idea what they are doing, apart from behaving psychopathically.
For even the brightest amongst them, the ones that they give prizes to, are out of their depth in the hyperreal marketplace.

The market has become an overwhelming ogre.
The main reason that the markets are not going to respond positively to any financial bailout is this - all the major players understand that Credit Derivatives are the Real Monsters in the Deep.
We ain't seen nothing yet.

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Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to subscribers only.

© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised #

"Monopoly structures (and any state is a monopoly, since it claims a monopoly in the political and social spheres) cannot but secrete a para-political society, a mafia of some sort, to control this form of generalised corruption. It is pure hypocrisy on behalf of the political authorities to fight this mafia, since it is an emanation of those authorities themselves." - Jean Baudrillard.

"Effectively, truth is trumped by the best possible input-output equation." - Jean-François Lyotard.

"The only suspense that remains is that of knowing how far the world can derealise itself before succumbing to the reality deficit, or, conversely, how far it can hyperrealise itself before succumbing to an excess of reality (the point when, having become perfectly real, truer than true, it will fall into the clutches of total simulation)." - Jean Baudrillard.

This is not a valid system.

And, despite the desperate provision of trillions of dollars worth of liquidity into the banking system, together with a concerted media attempt to bury away the bad news and promote the illusory recovery, the markets remain in deep deep trouble.

Yesterday, we quoted John Authers of the Financial Times regarding the relevance and market information that might be gleaned from the bounce that follows a Market Crash.
In 1929, Wall Street gained 18.8% in the two days following the Crash.
The Crash still became the deepest recession of the century - the Depression.
In 1987, the Dow bounced by 16.6% in the two-day rally following Black Monday.
As the bell rang this evening on Wall Street, the rally hadn't even lasted two days, and the cumulative rebound of the market was just 9.6%.
And this is despite the banning on short-selling of over 900 financial stocks.

And 1929 didn't appear against the backdrop of systemic and super-systemic risk regarding externalities eg climate change.

Lets put some scale into the figures first.
The Iraq war costs the US taxpayer $600 billion per year.
The bailout of the financial system has already provided the US government with gross liabilities of twice this amount - $1,250 billion.
The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) in their most recent report stated that: "the notional value of all outstanding global derivatives contracts is $600 trillion".
$600,000,000,000,000 - one thousand times greater than the annual cost of bombing wedding parties and securing the oil pipelines in Iraq.
This figure is 11 times the annual global output!
We repeat the point that universal healthcare for all US citizens would cost $50 billion per annum.
Last year, over three hundred of the largest 500 companies in Britain paid no tax whatsoever.
At current projections, the British bailout of the banking sector is set to cost every taxpayer £13,000.
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This is not a valid system.

There are two areas that we wish to address today - the Reality of the Depression and the Hyperreality of Psychopathic Capitalism. Rather than separating these two functions out, we'll allow them to intertwine as we take you on a random walk around the fallout from the first phase of the largest recession since Wall Street was founded by those lovable robber barons 112 years ago.

In its current issue, the Economist produces a special supplement - 'When Fortune Frowned'. We would prefer the slant taken by Joseph Stiglitz - 'Reversal Of Fortune'.
In their pullout, the free market ideologues attempt to justify their system against the charges laid against it.
They totally fail to refute the charges.
The verdict has to be guilty.

This is not a valid system.

Last week, China's vice-premier, Wong Qishan, told Dick Cheney that "the teachers now have become the problem". Presumably, Mr Dark Side muttered "go fuck yourself" as his wont when faced with a contrary opinion.
Paul Volcker, former chairperson of the Federal Reserve, states: "... for all its talented participants, for all its rich rewards, the bright new financial system has failed the test of the marketplace."

While accepting a minor role in the Depression, the free marketeers prefer to blame other parties, both peripheral and more central to the deconstruction of a system.
So the financial system is blaming the governments, the central banks, the regulators, short-sellers, hedge funds in general (their punishment was their 2nd worse monthly performance ever in September), Chinese economic policy as well as the all too few limitations that still exist on the freedom of movement of capital.

Each of these bodies, sectors and/or institutions have played their part in the Crash, but it is the fundamental template of a free market system that has defined the rules of engagement.
The system is non-sustainable, repeated crises are an inevitability, implosion is nailed on.
Each sub-sector behaves voraciously in its own self-interest, ignoring the counterparty risks of their ever-more-risky behaviour, the feedback loops from such attitudes and the external risks and the systemic ones too.
So the free marketeers blame the US government for planting biofuels instead of food crops, but the government had to take action, however misguided, as the neo-liberals would never voluntarily take on board systemic costs like those addressing climate change.
So, not only is the state based economic system effectively a deep state mafia, but the structure of the entity is also entirely self-destructive.
Co-operation is a weakness, hence crisis will always follow crisis.
Furthermore, government intervention is loopholed so that any regulation might be gamed for the optimum performativity of the financial system.
Sharing the blame around different centres of the same authoritarian system is not going to work - all loci of the financial sector are guilty as charged.

As Baudrillard's first statement above clearly states, the separation of these bodies in times of crisis is a false construct.
These bodies are the financial mafia - these people game the financial system from a position of power.
We have a state-based economic system - the state and the financial system are one and the same thing.
Otherwise perhaps we might have been offered a referendum on the colossal cost of the socialisation of the privateers costs.

This is not a valid system.

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The BIS have warned for years about excess global liquidity and have urged central bankers to worry about asset bubbles and to address the financial system holistically and strategically rather than in an atomised and short-term manner.
Today's calamity, according to the BIS, stems from one fundamental source: a world where credit-driven excesses went on for too long.
"The unsustainable has run its course" stated the BIS in its latest annual report.
Financial bubbles suit insiders, speculators and those that drive the market dynamics via policy. Far greater sums are able to be amassed by these systemic insiders via a boom-and-bust cycle.
Just consider the maths - if you are aware of the market turning points in a boom-and-bust cyclical market, you will be able to establish far greater profits at the expense of the uninitiated and the gullible, compared to a stable market structure that advanced by a steady average percentage annually and offered equal rewards to all (with a meritocratic input for true analytical overperformance).

This is not a valid system.

The chief reason why capitalism is doomed to die an ignominious death is to be found in its very nature.
For decades after the Depression, the latter day robber barons had to make do with a stakeholder version of their system. And, if you are going to be arguing a capitalist perspective, it worked as well as the current shareholder system if one assesses success by growth - economic growth in the 50's and 60's has matched the free market growth of recent decades.
But there is a difference between the stakeholder and shareholder versions of capitalism. In the latter, income inequality is the defining structural formation - the rich get markedly richer, the rest of us virtually stand still.
The final stage of capitalism's development is the psychopathic.

The only argument left to the neo-liberals is this one - this Depression would not have occurred if they had just been allowed to get on with it without regulation, government and central banks.
And, they are correct on this one.
The Depression would not have happened as a window of economic hyperreality, we would be in a state of Permanent Depression in an Orwellian nightmare of some magnitude.
If we allowed these operators full freedom, we would be guaranteed a fascistic financial framework controlled by a psychopathic elite.
They use the example of hedge funds to support their argument that a lack of regulation produces free market nirvana.
Yet Paulson had to demolish the hedge funds' business model via his ban on short-selling for the very reason that the speculative behaviour of the funds was demolishing the efficacy of the market.

Psychopathic behaviour takes short-termism to extremes, the only way to rein in these operators is via extensive and binding global regulation.

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This is not a valid system.

The very core of the argument of the Economist is made clear by their rather rosy view of the integrity of speculators.
"If speculators were distorting commodity prices rather than improving price discovery, there may be good reason to shift the balance between government and market" they gush.
This is the central point.
In a leader in the summer, the Economist stated that: "... since no oil is ever held back from the market, these [speculative] bets do not affect the price of oil any more than bets on a football match affect the result."

Whether by design or otherwise, they selected the wrong analogy - their QED, in effect, is a speculative own goal.
As any Asian market maker would be able to inform them, the betting markets influence the results in all sports. But, particularly in football.
It is all a matter of incentives.
On leading Premiership matches, the Asian underground markets are liquid up to £1 billion ($2 billion). Moreover, the leading market makers have, by a combination of bribery and coercion, established networks of inside agents who are able to create the outcomes required by the betting industry. My Asian broker, for example, calculates that over 90% of matches in the Premiership (by far the worst of the main leagues for corruption) are governed entirely by dark pools of liquidity.

The direct parallel with the financial markets is evident.
Speculation distorts the integrity of markets.

This is not a valid system.

So, where do the markets go from here.
As the Economist reluctantly concedes: "... private sector debts are much higher than in the 30's, so a Depression will be even nastier."
And this is without factoring in the impact of climate change.

America Inc and Britain PLC are entirely dependent on China - I bet the Strange Idiot Child from Texas is now regretting letting a Sudanese refugee carry the US flag at the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony!
US/UK are desperate for China to loosen fiscal policy and to allow its currency, the yuan, to strengthen.
But, why would they do this?
Via its huge reserves of US dollars, China is currently keeping America afloat anyway.
And, the Chinese are very confident of their market prowess, as, indeed, they are in football betting markets. While Paulson was banning short-selling and targeting bailouts, China extended their acceptance of short-sellers, regarding such a strategy as proof of the stability and validity of their market.
It isn't proof, but its a lot more convincing than the US/UK reactions.

Because the dollar is the world's reserve currency, it is a major advantage to the US. But the current crisis is severely testing many of the foundations on which foreigners faith in the dollar is based eg stable free markets.
The Economist states: "If foreigners ever flee the dollar, America will have the twin nightmares that haunt emerging economies in financial collapse - simultaneous banking and currency crises."

China can instigate this strategy at any time of their choosing.

In the short-term, while China allows America to keep its corporate head above water, the US will be dependent on some very unsavoury characters to bolster their deflated financial egos. For, sovereign wealth funds from Singapore, China, Thailand, Saudi Arabia and Russia will have to be tapped, and there are those who question the validity of supporting the economic system utilising the input from autocratic and authoritarian governments.
There is no logic to this fear, for these countries too are merely state-based economic systems.

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This Crisis is only being partially addressed at the moment.
As the Economist states: "Central bankers - however creative - cannot solve this mess with injections of liquidity alone. It is a crisis of solvency as well as liquidity."
Ah, that would be a Depression, then...

150 years ago, so you might think that his arguments might have been taken on board by now, Hyman Minsky argued that economic stability encouraged ever greater leverage and ambitious debt structures. He correctly claimed that: "Stable finance is an illusion."

In desperation, towards the conclusion of their poorly argued case for a non-sustainable system, the Economist pleads with us to believe them when they claim that "... provided markets are competitive and well regulated, it doesn't make much difference who owns the firms concerned."

Three points.
i) If it doesn't make a difference who owns the firms, why should owners and chief executives be rewarded so handsomely? Indeed, surely a better gaming of the incentives would be for the regulators to be paid wages one hundred times greater than the bosses, so that talent might prevent serial abuses rather than being the cause of them.

ii) Mature markets are not competitive. Non-competitive structures abound in psychopathic mature markets - cartels, monopolies, duopolies, oligarchies, consortia of shared interests etc etc. This is a systemic issue without resolution, accept by the dismantling of the entire system.

iii) The markets are not well regulated. They are either self-regulated, regulated by acquiescent bodies or not regulated at all. It is simply not feasible to reconstruct this psychopathic system at an earlier phase of maturity. And, if it were feasible, the system would instantly create the dynamic to return to its current psychopathic equilibrium state.

What about a system where rewards, in that they exist, are heavily tilted towards sustainability, strategic planning, nurturing, developing meritocratic social structures for the benefit of all participants, rather than one where the only people willing to take on the degree of antisocial required to sack tens of thousands of human beings, while operating a slave-trade workhouse in some lightly regulated Third World country, are the psychopaths that we now have in control.

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Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to subscribers only.

© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological

Pouvoir-Savoir #

So...
Has capitalism been saved?
If you were to believe the hysterical coverage in the mainstream capitalist media, you would certainly think so.

After trillions of dollars have been simply handed over to the architects of the Crash, the markets bounced back slightly from the 40% losses that they have experienced in the last months.
After all of the previous efforts to create a safety net, the markets plummeted, yesterday, they merely stabilised.
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Quoting John Authers of the Financial Times: "Markets are good at bouncing; their course is naturally erratic and a move like this does not prove the trend has changed. After the 1929 crash, which prefaced disaster, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 18.8 per cent on the next two days. There was a two-day rally of 16.6 per cent after Black Monday in 1987... So the bounce is unsurprising, and sheds no light on where markets will go next... Furthermore, we need to look at what prompted the bounce. The latest actions to bolster the international banking system are extreme. Other actions that looked extreme at the time had no effect. It would have been alarming if they had not had a response now."

Markets are not free and prices are not Real.

Neo-classical economists would have us believe that markets are efficient ie all the information is in the price.
This is patently not the case.
Firstly, there is the impact of our behavioural irrationalities.
Markets are not economic mechanisms but psychological ones.
The prices are entirely fake, and are not based on either the economic fundamentals or the systemic Realities.
Behavioural mechanisms make the 'true' price an imaginary concept.

But, that is not all.
The rampant cornering and insider trading of markets for speculative gain further distorts the 'true' price so that the prices quoted on screens and by brokers are simply figments of the collective imaginations of a privileged grouping of market architects.
It is simply not feasible to build a sustainable system on such a Poker Reality.

Furthermore, as we posted yesterday, neither systemic risk nor externalities are factored into the market prices - we used the example of the car purchase price only representing one of the costs that such a purchase brings to the planet.
All financial markets demonstrate inflated values due to this refusal to accept systemic risk and costs into the price.
The market price is ALWAYS too high.

The combination of fake price and the attempts to create a fake investor psychology are the only levers left as we slump towards the deepest Depression in a century.
So, the US/UK have been in recession throughout 2008 and yet still the prediction markets price the probability of recession in the US in 2008 market at 80 on the indices (a make-up of 100 represents a recession).
Apparently, there is no recession in the US despite trillions of dollars failing to bolster the system, the foreclosure of 3.6 million homes, the fear of hyperinflation through the gaming of the markets via interest rate cuts, the disappearance of the investment banking sector, the biggest weekly Wall Street losses ever etc etc etc.

Quoting Joseph Stiglitz: "A unique combination of ideology, special-interest pressure, populist politics, bad economics, and sheer incompetence has brought us to our present condition... As America attempts to work its way out of the present crisis, the danger is that we will listen to the same people on Wall Street and in the economic establishment who got us into it. For them, our current predicament is another opportunity: if they can shape the government response appropriately, they stand to gain, or at least stand to lose less, and they may be willing to sacrifice the well-being of the economy for their own benefit - just as they did in the past."

We have repeatedly posted how Hank Paulson has been #####################
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The markets would have made a more ordered retreat if he had not deconstructed Lehman Brothers, and even this year's Nobel Prize winner for Economics, Paul Krugman, places responsibility at Paulson's door.

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But his hidden agendas are equivalent in strategy.
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So a private payment of taxpayers money was made to a group of investment banks, including Goldman Sachs, while, publicly, the Fed refused to state that the rescue came under the auspices of the Depression-era rescue package.
Several days later, the Fed were forced to mention such a Reality when, despite the transfer, Bear Stearns went out of business.

Under terms of the $700 bailout (remember how Paulson described this amount as being the absolute total required to save the system?), the Fed would have to publicise private use of public money as it took place.
But, guess what?
At the Fed's request, this information can be kept confidential!
So Paulson can provide backhanders and kickbacks to his financial friends without any of us being any the wiser.

And this type of template defines the infrastructure that will lead to the next wave of this Recession/Depression.
Just before Paulson allowed Lehman Brothers to be deconstructed, the investment bank was in the process of setting up a new business called Baikal with the London Stock Exchange.
Baikal was a Dark Pool.
Dark Pools are private exchanges where institutional investors are able to trade huge quantities of financial assets away from the regulators' or the public eye.
This infrastructure is primed for corruption.
Indeed, we are preparing an internal consultancy document assessing the different ways that the financial system can be gamed by these Dark Pools of massive liquidity.

These private underground markets are the absolute equivalent of the underground betting markets that are destroying the sporting world.
It is the final phase of capitalism, from the stakeholder to the shareholder to the psychopathic...

A key issue in this crisis has been the focus on the micro - interest rates, inflation, share prices, bond yields, market sentiment etc.
The Reality is, however, defined by the macro.
The systemic risks and externalities that are not factored into this strategy are, by a considerable distance, the more prevalent ones.
The autistic focus on the micro is defining the fruition of the massive negative impacts of the macro.
The fake figures that are being traded simply ignore the systemic risk of climate change, for example.

Some of these trillions of pounds and dollars could have been used for the social - universal healthcare in the US comes out at $50 billion per year, for example.
For years to come, there will be real reductions in the amount of money available for healthcare, education, the social, as we cannot expect that the US/UK imperial war adventures are going to be curtailed.

We are not angry enough about this audacious robbery.

After Paulson had bailed out insurance giant, AIG, with $85 billion of taxpayer's money, the executives of AIG threw a spa party to celebrate.
The cost?
$500,000.
Just weeks later, AIG were back to receive a further $38.5 billion off Paulson.
The cost of Grade A Cocaine is obviously inflating in the Crash.

Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to subscribers only.

© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological