Thursday, 16 October 2008

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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