Never Forget That Bradley Manning, Not Gay Marriage, Is The Issue - by John Pilger

http://awunchofbankers.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/never-forget-that-bradley-manning-not.html

The Last Post

After 2012 days of blogging and over 1100 posts, Football is Fixed is no more.

We have attempted to mix the personal, the political and the holistics of corruption in football and beyond.

Having taken on Hobbesian psychopathy in all forms for over five and a half years, it is time for new ventures.

Thanks to everyone who has played any part whatsoever in this process.

You'll miss us now we're gone.

Fractal Football and Gizan Geysers

The Pyramids of Giza serve as a graphic to help describe a simple 3-D model of corruption in football

The power pyramid on the left represents agents, betting, mafia.
The power pyramid on the right represents the ruling bodies, the national associations, major leagues.
The power pyramid in the centre represents the territory where these two other pyramids mingle - the upper part of the central pyramid is the white market, the lower half is the grey market and the underground is the underground.

Any organisation, cartel, consortia, committee, institution, and any of their tentacles of operation may undertake quantised interactions with any other entity in either of the side pyramids. These equilibria exist at various layers in the central pyramid depending upon their degree of opacity. Clusters frequently develop but swiftly disperse due to a bounty of proprietary (and often antisocial) agendas.

When we delve into the dire, diabolical, desperate, difficult, dangerous, dodgy world of the underground, one might discover that the same equilibria repeatedly develop.

Betting dominates the left hand power pyramid - that is where all the various interests choose to coincide.
Committee poisons the right hand power pyramid.
Their combination is disastrous for football.

Because the brand is everything, we are presented with a truly Orwellian world where bodies like UEFA and the EPL undertake 'white corruption' to undermine more serious forms of 'grey/black corruption'.
For UEFA, an East European team backed by gun running in Transdniestria or a dodgy penalty to the crappy French team?
For EPL, allow a mass insider cornered market on a Premier League game or take actions to challenge that criminality?

Because the brands cannot be tainted, they play with our neohyperrealities.

In the good old days of fixed football in the 90's, every so often a game would come up that was fixed - Juventus v Piacenza, say, after Gianni Agnelli's death.
Nowadays, there are very few top flight European league matches that don't have several competing power bases all believing that they have control of the event.

Total Football.
Forget that...
... what we are dealing on here, girls and boys, is Total Poker.

A number of insiders around a virtual table with Dark Pool inputs and individual operators controlling their bids. Player A looks comfortable with a midfielder and some injury information, while Player B is hoping that the 4th Official might influence the referee, but Player C owns a team and the opposing goalie and is piling on the chips.

Under Blatter, the global game has deteriorated to this gambling spectacle we witness today, as he and his cronies stuff the booty in their bags and run for cover.

To their credit (limited in certain cases, very limited in others), UEFA and the Amazing Mr Platini, Interpol, HMR&C, some European bookmakers and, most critically in the world of the middle pyramid, some Asian market makers are attempting to dislodge rogue consortia from the game.
All but the most psychopathic understand that the time has come to rein in the corruption - the general public are in no mood to countenance being ripped off by crowds of addicted shysters.
The EPL has finally discovered that the psychopathic template has its limitations
The system is not accepting further destabilisation.

This might not clean the game up in the medium term but at least we will have a classier form of fix!

The End of Manchester United As We Know It - A Flashback

A Post from January 5th 2012...
... before all the seriously organised sporting crime.
___________________________________________________________________________________

On the 23rd of October 2011, an idea for an app came to mind...
... the number nineteen on a red background would slowly morph into 1-6 on a sky blue background.

Less than a fortnight later and Steve Bruce and Wes Brown were needed to ensure that Sir Ferguson's 25th anniversary was marketed correctly.
The naming of the Sir Alex Ferguson Stand on that very date was the ultimate sell sign.

Manchester United are in terminal decline - there are no redeeming aspects.
Like Chelsea post-Mourinho, the fade from glory will see the occasional triumph but the days of dominance will fade into the mists of universal time.

Unable to get more than three draws against the might of Basel and Benfica, the financial cost of failing to reach the second phase of the Champions League is colossal.
Even more so when oodles of cash are needed to fund the interest payments on the leveraged buyout enacted by the Glazers in their medium term strategy of asset stripping par excellence, while grabbing some financial action themselves.

And the internal psychology of the club is in decline too.
Insider trading from within Manchester United accompanied both of their Champions League Final defeats to Barcelona (hardly an indication of a robust structure). United were not even competitive in either of these events.

Massive insider trading against United was also undertaken prior to the two most recent defeats against Blackburn (bottom of the table) and Newcastle (five points from 8 games prior to Man U). Very serious money indeed was traded against the mighty reds in both games.
You could get 30/1 on Blackburn winning!!!

The holistic is dire - Ferguson announcing three more years (and the timing) is a strategic weakness, the battling with an already declining Rooney is counter-productive, while chatting with Asian bookmakers is surely not what one should expect from a knight of the monarchy.

There is no waiting list for season tickets, and tickets are available for virtually all home games, the power structures behind Liverpool, Sunderland, Newcastle, Chelsea, Tottenham, Villa, Manchester City (especially) and even Stoke are more robust (only Arsenal are similarly self-harming), Ronaldo and Tevez haven't been replaced and there is no money available for anything other than low/mid tier transfers.
Worse still, the 'acclaimed' next wave of youth is not looking quite so promising anymore - they are certainly not Giggs, Scholes, the Nevilles and Beckham anyway.

And even worse still, the available squad in their current state of injuries, form and mind are simply not up to it.

De Gea is not der Sar.
Lindegaard's mentor is Roy Carroll to the delight of the laying community. Hence the media campaign against De Gea.

United don't have a right back, Jones is an incredibly amusing blundering buffoon - it is a little like watching Tommy Cooper on wiz as his three own goals this season outscore his one goal at the right end in his entire club career.
Ferdinand must have a good agent because he crossed the white finishing line a decade ago.
Vidic is out for an eternity and Smalling is injured. Evans is poor and only Evra is up to scratch in the defence.

Nani is not the player of last year, Fletcher is probably not going to play again, Giggs cannot juggle his sex life and the football for much longer, Carrick is useless, Gibson and Valencia haven't evolved and Anderson frustrates. Park is okay though.

Berbatov is a dodgy smoker, Rooney a loose cannon, the Little Pea has been podded and has lost some pace to boot, while Michael Owen has a Timeform squiggle next to his name.
So Welbeck is the only forward.

In comparison, City are stable.
Their owners have a long term strategy and are self-financing, so no payments to financial institutions.
City fit into the array of businesses that the Abu Dhabi Chaebol are assembling.
The psychology is positive. The sky is the limit. The best young kids are veering to City.
Tevez hasn't been missed and can be replaced by anyone they want as Champions League is no longer a distraction.

I was at Newcastle for Manchester City's 4-3 victory that gave the Sky Blues the title in 1968 - United imploded on the same day at home to Sunderland.
So it seems apt that City fans can start celebrating the next title on the night that United yet again imploded against a north eastern team.
And 44 years and 2 days on, City will be handed the EPL trophy as United no doubt implode once again against Sunderland on May 13th.

Knowing when to stop is the mark of a man.
Sir Ferguson is going on three years too far...
... for his legacy and for the club.

© Football is Fixed 2006-2012

Sir Alex Ferguson - Bringing the Game into Disrepute

When we produced our series of blog posts entitled "What an Incredible Fluke", we were demonstrating that you don't have to make libellous comment to expose the corruptions within the English Premier League.

We particularly focused on the distortions in the EPL Title Race.

PGMOB Referees Webb, Foy, Marriner, Jones and Mason have exhibited a statistically significant but obviously unconscious bias in favour of Manchester United in their careers.

So shall we take a look at the selection of referees over the last few rounds of the handicap race?
Oh yes we shall...

Manchester United

Sunderland (Webb)
Swansea (Foy)
Man City (Marriner)
Everton (Jones)

Manchester City

QPR (Dean)
Newcastle (Webb)
Man Utd (Marriner)
Wolves (Mason - changed after pressure from Eastlands)
Norwich (Foy)

Dean excepted, spot any pattern?

But lets go further back on United 'matches'.

Prior to Aston Villa and Wigan, QPR (Mason), Blackburn (Webb), Fulham (Webb 4th Official to junior referee), Wolves (Webb 4th Official to junior referee), West Brom (Foy 4th Official to junior referee) - if you are a low level official making your way in the world, having PC Webb or PC Foy shouting into your ear most certainly has an influence on decisions!

In 9 of the last 11 matches of the season, United have had an official with historical bias in their favour controlling the decision-making!

In that the season began with 19 PGMOB officials, we would have to ask...
... Why?

And why has Foy got Stoke v Bolton today - the match that Bolton must win to keep QPR keen?

And why did the now-retired Peter Walton, in his last 22 matches officiating either City or United, produce NO City wins and NO United defeats?

If this was Russia, we would call it corruption.
If it was Italy, we would call it the mafia.

But it is England so it must be the Premier League Establishment!

Football is Fixed - the Arbitrageurs of the Neohyperrealities of Postmodern Football.

© Football is Fixed 2006-2012

Dark Pools Produce Black Swans, Black Pools Produce Black Holes (A Flashback Post)

...And Other Aesthetic Fetishisms Of The Hyperlate Capitalist Disorder

Incipit parodia...

There is a Russian saying - another's soul is a dark pool...

The infrastructure of financial markets is an inverted underground pyramid, which would seem apt for such a pernicious Ponzi scheme.

Firstly, we are presented with the public markets with their tenuous links to Reality but then there are the Dark Pools and, most importantly, deeper still the even Darker Pools (Black Pools?).

All investment banks operate their own proprietary Dark Pool out of sight of regulatory bodies and non-insider traders.

This is dodgy enough.

But these separate pools then conglomerate and trade off one another in even Darker Pools which effectively are the High Stakes Poker Tables that determine every hyperreality.

And who can blame an antisocial corporate body for behaving in such a psychopathic manner?

Would one rather place one's trade secretly and anonymously in non-regulated underground markets and earn the kudos of the brokerage (plus rewards) while gaming the release of this information to the public markets OR would one prefer going to the public markets, dealing with the Commitment of Traders Reports etc with the associated risks of all sorts of upsets from the loss of input price to getting cornered?

Before moving to a more specific evaluation of Dark Pools, Black Pools and Black Swans, let us focus for a moment on three aspects of the ongoing Depression - Quantitative Easing (QE), the banks and outsourcing.

QE has only been successful in blowing an equity bubble.
There is no credit growth in the remainder of the economy.
Effectively, the investment bankers have been betting on a certainty utilising our money as their trading bank, having lost their cash and assets in a previous gamble gone wrong.
There is no investment in the 'real' economy because these people understand that it is fucked.
Meanwhile all of our existences go to pot.

As Noam Chomsky says, we are dealing with "cognitive regulatory capture" by the banks, shadow markets and exchanges.

The Economist: "My main worry is that central banks are repeating the same mistake they have made for the last 25 years. They have intervened to support asset prices by cutting rates whenever markets faltered. This encouraged speculators to borrow money to buy assets, inflating one bubble after another. QE is just the logical endpoint of this process where central banks are cutting out the middleman and buying assets directly.
In the long run, however, asset values are constrained by the growth rate of the economy. Any attempt to maintain them artificially will either end in failure or will be successful only by inflating other prices until they come in line."

Phillip Stevens: "There are a couple of things to say about Britain's banks. They still pose a serious threat to the nation's long term stability and prosperity. They rely for their profits - for the huge bonuses paid to senior staff - on the fact that taxpayers are underwriting the risks. Thus public subsidy is turned into private profit."

Additionally, the competitive nature of neoliberal banking causes structural deficiencies on the road to anti-competitive monopolies or, if we are lucky, duopolies or cartels.

In Australia, meanwhile, the Big Four Banks are forbidden by bipartisan agreement to take each other over.
John Grimond: "That meant they [the banks] had no incentive to pump up their share price or earnings through dealing in dubious products."

Psychopathic short-termism pervades all aspects of this system.

Take outsourcing...

The fundamental stupidity of the globalising firms utilising outsourcing, offshoring and other psycho-fads was that by removing skilled employees, supply bases and infrastructure, distribution networks and sourcing plants from their home country, they had absolutely nothing to return to once the inevitable wage inflation took off in the outsourced territories.
They destroyed, in an act of selfish greed, in order to optimise short term returns to their shareholders.
Strategic this was not.

Through leaving externalities out of their system, the Friedmanists produce successions of Black Swan events, statistically unlikely eruptions in the system caused by chaos and stuff.

Naseem Taleb sums up the current financial crisis even if the imbecility of his concept of Anti-Fragility is just another ruse to continue with a system that has nowhere left to turn.
Super-systemic risk out-quantums evolutionary shock absorption any day of the week.

The current crisis has three causes:
a) an increase in hidden risk and exposure to low probability events (Black Swans). Too much debt was taken on and debt forces one to be very accurate in one's forecasts as a small error leads to ruin.
b) there were asymmetric incentives allowing traders to bet against the probability of events with other people's money leading to lots of rich traders and lots of poor investors.
c) There was a misunderstanding of the tail risks fostered by 'theories' such as Value at Risk which Taleb describes as "the biggest charlatanism in intellectual history" - What? Even bigger than Hayek. Having such models is worse than having no models at all.

His within-system solution is to have maluses as well as bonuses to prevent traders and executives gaming the system.

A deconstruction of the entire farcical edifice would, of course be, preferable.

But let us return to the pre-hypothesis of Anti-Fragility.

Being human, all of our market constructs share structural similarities - currency markets, the insurance industry, options and futures, bookmaking - effectively a hierarchy of psychopathic matrices that only vary to the degree that they are willing to sell their own grandmother.

Taleb's attempt at deep thought is simply myopic.
For sure, all systems are in a state of constant flux and benefit from the shocks and new templates that roller-coaster along their evolutionary paths.
Such equilibrium states are a conglomeration of these instabilities.
But this does not justify pushing aspects like man-made climate change to the limits as there is another level to evolutionary progress - a quantum one.

For the sake of the argument, look at football betting markets in-running.
As the action unfolds in front of our eyes and the roles of the participants become clear, the state of equilibrium is repeatedly disturbed by micro-events on the field of play.
As these motivational and manipulated inputs progress, there is a build up to a completely different quantum reality - the change from a 0-0 scoreline to 1-0.
Once the goal has been scored, the anti-fragility continues but at an entirely new level.

So it is with climate change - Taleb needs to get holistically Real!

Living in a world of state-based economic systems, it should not be surprising that statist structures mimic the Dark Pool/Black Pool template.
For example, Jean Claude Juncker (Chair of the Euro Group of Finance Ministers) has spoken of the need for "secret, dark debates in economic policy making."

Ah! Democracy...

Jack Rasmus: "On June 1, stock markets in New York and around the world declined in levels not seen since last summer 2010. Days and weeks immediately ahead will likely register even further significant market declines, as the obvious becomes increasingly evident: the U.S. and other major global economies are once again on the cusp of a significant slowdown."

The double-dip Cassiopeia-shaped Depression is alive and well with even Barclays Capital pondering that "Malthus may turn out to be right, but with broader implications than he may have imagined."

The degree of simulation is surreal - we are experiencing "the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal" according to Baudrillard.
In 'The Perfect Crime' he goes further...
"The only suspense that remains is that of knowing how far the world can derealise itself before succumbing to its 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)."

Meanwhile Slavoj Žižek foresees a time when "money will finally become a purely virtual form of reference, no longer materialised in any particular object."

The Hegelian concept is to progress from the green immediacy of life to its great conceptual structure allowing us to mature without losing the origin.

Free market capitalism, in its psychopathic short-termist greed, has lost this plot big style...

© Football is Fixed 2006-2012

Manipulated Markets

All financial markets are gamed by insiders seeking cornered structures, collaborative manipulations and inappropriate competitive advantages.

The surprising factor is that human behaviouralism results in exactly the same corrupt edifices being constructed across the market continuum - Goldman Sachs betting against disinformational advice sold to clients, banks working together to manipulate the LIBOR (London Inter-Bank Offered Rate), football agents working to inflate the values of their clients, bookmakers working in unison to achieve the required outcomes in criminalised football matches...

The parallel simplicities of these corruptions are marked - due to minimal external enforcement of the rules and laws in existence, the perpetrators do not have to put much effort into covering their murky tracks.
So they don't.

In this post, we explore these parallels and the issues arising.

The Economist: "It [the LIBOR] is supposed to be constructed using banks' own honest estimates of what it costs for them to borrow money. But regulators around the world suspect that LIBOR... has been subject to manipulation."
Banks' individual borrowing costs prove to be remarkably similar considering their varied levels of risk.
The Economist continues: "The court documents suggest that a group of traders regularly contacted one another to discuss how to influence the Yen LIBOR rate."

And so it is with football betting markets and the player transfer markets.

Primary level betting organisations, taking their cue from the highly liquid underground Dark Pools that are the foundation of postmodern football, co-ordinate match prices between themselves to optimise returns from the event.
This disguises the hyperreality of corruption from the public eye.

Take a fixed match that is regarded by insiders as a certainty but the information leading to this outcome is not open source.
Market makers will price the event based on an array of inputs that maximises their combined returns - if one firm were to suggest that Team A should be priced at 1/100, the market would be destroyed.

This collaboration between the market makers works along competitive pricing in the micro ie the bookmakers want to rip off mugs primarily but their competitor firms secondarily and strategically.

Or take the transfer market.
Agents, club agents and club managers hold a series of private meetings whereby the value of a player is assessed.
But this 'value' is not real - it is an inflation on price to the benefit of the various agents and the club manager(s) involved in the deal.

Once again, football on the whole loses out so that insiders might take a much larger slice of the action via their percentage cuts and the variety of brown envelopes and briefcases changing hands.

The Economist prints the case filing on the LIBOR manipulation where one trader from a whistleblowing bank (Trader A) helps to manipulate the market with a Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) insider: "Trader A explained to one RBS IRD trader who his collusive contacts were and how he had and was going to manipulate Yen LIBOR. Trader A also communicated his trading positions, his desire for a certain movement in Yen LIBOR and gave instructions for the RBS IRD trader to get RBS to make Yen LIBOR submissions consistent with Trader A's wishes. The RBS IRD trader acknowledged these communications and confirmed that he would follow through. Trader A and the RBS IRD trader also entered into transactions that aligned their trading interests in regards to Yen LIBOR."

Or...

Bookmaker A explained to Bookmaker B who his collusive contacts (bookmakers, players, agents, referees) were and how he was going to manipulate the match outcome. Bookmaker A also transmitted his trading positions, his desire for a certain result and gave instructions for Bookmaker B to get his organisation to use its contacts to enhance the match manipulation. Bookmaker B acknowledged these communications and confirmed that he would follow through. Bookmaker A and Bookmaker B also entered into transactions that aligned their trading interests in regards to the match outcome.

Or...

Agent A explained to Manager B who his collusive contacts (other agents, club agents, managers) were and how he was going to manipulate the transfer fee. Agent A also transmitted his player valuations, his desire for a certain minimum transfer fee and gave instructions to Manager B to use his contacts to inflate the price. Manager B acknowledged these communications and confirmed that he would follow through. Agent A, Manager B and other interested parties also entered into transactions that aligned their financial interests in regards to the inflated transfer fee.

All of which is illegal, although in football that matters little as there is no regulation and being bent is a core competency.

But this is short-termist and psychopathic.

Civil cases may be brought against the perpetrators.
* Large individual cases might be brought by either other bookmaking organisations or the club owners with respect to betting and transfer corruptions.
* Traders on the wrong side of manipulated bets or club employees suffering the consequences might bring class action suits.
* Traders whose winnings are limited or clubs who lose out on future transfer fees might also have a case if intent can be proved.
* Individual bettors can group together to create class action suits to reclaim losses on events manipulated by insiders.

The similarities in the forms of financial market manipulation is enhanced in a wired world where mass behaviouralisms become global consciousness 'wisdoms' at a pace while the individual manipulators believe that their omnipotence places them ahead of the curve.

When actually there is no robustness whatsoever in such rubbish in/rubbish out corruptions.
Just a symbiotic relationship between market makers and crime.

Still...
The criminals who manipulate financial, betting and transfer markets utilising the same tactics...
... some of them are even the same individuals/organisations.

What a weird fluke!

© Football is Fixed 2006-2012

Four Corrupt Consortia Sitting On The Fence

Four Corrupt Consortia Sitting on the Fence
Four Corrupt Consortia Betting with some Pence
But if One Corrupt Consortium should suddenly see Sense
Billy Ng goes Home and the Huns are getting Tense.

Three Corrupt Consortia Sitting on the Fence
Three Corrupt Consortia Seeking Recompense
But if One Corrupt Consortium should do Due Diligence
Billy Miller goes Home and the Huns get more Tense.

Two Corrupt Consortia Sitting on the Fence
Two Corrupt Consortia - Asset Stripping Men
But if One Blue Knight Consortium should fall at the Final Fence
There'll only be one Saviour to stop Liquidation.

One Corrupt Consortium Sitting on the Fence
One Corrupt Consortium full of Craig Whyte's Men
But when Creditors pull the plug on the Duff Phelps Regimen
The Newco New Reality will be Clachnacuddin.

In The Lap of the Big Bang - A Post from 2008

Why Free Market Capitalism Cannot Work; Why It Is Pointless To Reform Something That Cannot Work; Why Nobody Believes In Free Markets Anymore Although We Want To Maintain Appearances; Why It Is Time For A New Equilibrium State

Fractally speaking, all of our existences are to be determined to a major extent by the Physics of the Big Bang.
For financial economists, this is a pretty large externality to have left out of your risk assessments!
And, yet, that is exactly how flimsy is the intellectual rigour underpinning Friedman, Hayek and the Chicago School so mighty in ObamaWorld.
Of course, all other externalities are stripped out of the pricing system too, in order that psychopathic growth may be achieved despite the production of Real Super-Systemic Risk.

Carcinogenic Capitalism.

Occurrences that have already happened, some in the dim and distant past, are affecting the dynamics, trends and movements in the financial markets today.

Behaviouralism and Darwinism are primary drivers of the financial markets and yet such structures as 'Moral Hazard' (where market operators take excessive risk safe in the knowledge that there is no personal downside to such risk) were built into the very fabric of the free market model.

None of this Fractal Mathematics, Psychology of Finance or Behaviouralism has been utilised by regulators, government or the financial system despite such knowledge having been freely available for half a century - Mandelbrot, Kahneman and Tversky published in the early sixties.

Benoît Mandelbrot: "Financial economics, as a discipline, is where Chemistry was in the 16th century: a messy compendium of proven know-how, misty folk wisdom, and unexamined assumptions and grandiose speculation."

Through the provision of a psychopathic regulation-lite template where individuals were rewarded for public displays of their psychopathy in action, we should hardly express surprise that the elevation of such antisocials up the economic, financial and political ladders has produced systemic psychopathy in the atmosphere of the system.
Short-termism leads to a lack of strategy which increases risk.
Refusal to accommodate externalities produces feedback loops that also engender systemic and super-systemic risk.

And while these characters were filling their pockets while we were all still focused on all that smoke and all those mirrors, they were basing their illusion on prehistoric 'science'.

Neo-classical economics is pre-Galilean in its simplicity. Multi-disciplinary it is not!
Then there are the chartists and the technical analysts, believing in their candlesticks and their head-and-shoulder formations, all blinkered to any Holistic Reality but following the same data, the same prices, the same (dis)information, plotting the same lines on the same charts utilising the same off-the-shelf software which, if it were of any Real value, would be being used in a proprietary trading environment for isolationist profit. Actually...
Then came the Idiot Physicists - Econophysicists - to spread disaster far and wide.
Holistically challenged, this new breed of trader possessed all the professional inadequacies of their predecessors but with a new twist - black boxes.
Algorithmic analysis has grown exponentially in the last decade.
Curiously enough, this neatly coincides with the onset of the Permanent Depression which, as we all know, began in 1997, or thereabouts.
Black boxes are perfect for shenanigans.
You feed in the inputs.
You train your black box to recognise patterns in this data.
You mock trade the black box.
You build the black box into your overall trading portfolio.
And cybernetics works, to an extent, but not if any econophysicists are involved it doesn't!

It is all dependent on the quality of the inputs.
There are many additional issues with relying solely on black box technologies for trading including different pattern relevance in different market phases and the impacts of Black Swans, for example.

The key charges laid on the Chicago doormat are damning in their veracity - archaic theory, non-multidisciplinary, no Real risk assessment, unsustainability as a core competency, belief in 'magic' technologies, an absence of any atmospheric analysis and engendering super-systemic catastrophe scenarios.
Meanwhile, our Chicago Economist In Chief, Barack Hussein Obama Himself, doesn't understand the basic concept of the price-earnings ratio, thinking it is termed the 'profit-earnings ratio' in a Friedmanian Slip.
This cannot be a good thing.

Before entirely deconstructing this nonsense, we need to take a closer look at the Real reasons why such a system can NEVER work.
Gosh! This is pretty exciting for a Monday morning, I can tell you :)

On October 19th 1987, Wall Street fell by 29.2% in the biggest daily decline in a century.
The probability of Wall Street falling this amount is 10 to the power of 50.
Mandelbrot: "You could span the powers of 10 from the smallest sub-atomic particle to the breadth of the measurable universe - and still never meet such a number."

Free market capitalism underprices risk.
In fact, it frequently excludes risk from the equation entirely.
The outcome of this blinkered approach to all of our Realities is that, in the words of Mandelbrot: "The odds of financial ruin in a free, global market economy have been grossly underestimated."

October 19th 1987 simply should not have occurred.
The 2008 Crash should never have happened either.
But they did and such Black Swans will continue to blight this myopic system until it is nicely deconstructed and put away in its box, under the bed.

Fractal Mathematics are the key here, obviously.
Butterflies flutter and hurricanes hit mainly Black areas, only to be ignored as an Unreality by government.
Decisions are made, systems developed, regulations changed, globalisation created, insider trading enacted, markets are cornered, monopolies allowed, cartels fragment, the state gets involved, new financial markets are established, private markets and Dark Pools established etc etc etc. Each of these quantums of influence set in process the fractal future.
Every single quantum Reality impacts on the future market price.

Behaviouralism cuts across all these feedback loops as a further fractal input.
As Slavoj Žižek states: "The problem is today when you have chaos or disorder, people lose their cognitive mapping."
Chaos reigns.

Take volatility.
There were more daily swings of 5% or more in the FTSE 100 in November 2008 than in total since the Second World War.
Were the market hyperrealities really more volatile in November or was Mass Psychology at play?
All fundamental, systemic, regulatory and cybernetic fractals are massively disordered by the impact of the Behavioural.
Although listed under their sub-sections of Gestalt or Psychoanalysis or whatever, there is a Darwinian dynamic to the manner in which markets evolve.
This, of course, brings us back to the 'animal spirits - psychopathy' doublespeak.

And this is why super-systemic risk is being so massively underpriced in the financial system.
While all of the free market ideologues and their apologists in the seats of power are shuffling the papers, printing the money, pretending that there is another boom-and-bust possibility in this game yet (which, unfortunately, there probably is) and extending this pretence to the territory of carbon markets and cap and trade schemes, each fundamentally flawed fractally in their Ponzi capitalism, there are super-systemic fractals that might just be worthy of closer inspection.
And not just by climate change scientists either...

Fractals are the most worrying aspect of the whole array of worrying factors that make up the subject of climate change.
If fractals can do 10 to the power of 50 with financial markets when destabilisation takes hold, imagine what fractals could achieve in an eco-system that is no longer in a sustainable equilibrium state!

Mandelbrot: "The two poles of human experience - deterministic systems of order and planning and the stochastic or random systems of irregularity and unpredictability."
The latter of these poles dominate the analysis today both in financial markets and in climate change.
Better frame the argument around the issue of bankers and their bonuses then...

Jean Baudrillard: "These systems, even when they are based on radical indeterminacy (the loss of meanings), fall prey, once more, to meaning. They collapse under the weight of their own monstrosity."

Andrew Haldane describes the inability to judge risk as "disaster myopia" - a lack of awareness of the network externalities in combination with misaligned incentives.
But this is merely the first layer of "disaster myopia".
The feedback loops, the fractals, the super-systemic risk, the quantuming between different equilibrium states would combine in a second layer - more "catastrophe myopia" really...

If free market snake-oil salespeople included the primary and secondary levels of externality in their pricing system, the entire edifice comes crumbling down under the weight of its own "monstrosity", a monstrosity based on inconsequence of intellectual input to the issue at hand.
There is no growth once externalities are built into the equation.
Once one takes the holistics into account, the trickledown effect, already entirely illusory, becomes, instead, a Cinderella-fantastic fairy tale of a neohyperreality.

There is no such entity as a sustainable Ponzi scheme.
And the weight of monstrosity is the gravity.
Every free market capitalist infrastructure is Pure Ponzi - from Albanian peasants to credit default swaps.

And, because the people who have been receiving excessive bonuses for the last quarter of a century made the selfish decisions that they did, even to the detriment of their own lines of offspring (psychopathy again), we are now in what Sun Tzu might have called the Worst Variety of Ground.
The fractals yet to be unleashed, the toxicity still to surface, the mass delusions and engendered mass psychologies yet to spiral out of rationality, will all come to fruition against the backdrop of a super-systemic lack of stable equilibrium.

So, a 'system' that produces negative growth if the externalities are included, produces this deficiency of utility on a foundation that spontaneously combusts repeatedly and fractally due to historical indiscretions.

These foundational externalities have been magnified by the Greed of the Great and the Good of the last centennial quartile.
They tell us that tax doesn't have to be taxing which, in self-application, would suggest that the Great and the Good would be more than willing to return all of their ill-gotten gains so that we all might start to implement a sustainable strategy that just might provide us with the remote feasibility of halting man-made climatic change.

Free market sorts, when still willing to defend their myths, frame their discussions around new regulation and innovation and growth and other words that have no directly Real meanings in our lives.
Free market sorts are enacting massive systemic ructions on the global financial architecture without any methodology or strategy whatsoever.
Big Butterflies produce Huge Hurricanes.
But their big thinking always stops short of being out-of-the-box; big ideas exist within the walled gardens of their illusory system.

We don't need tinkering.
We need deconstruction, thank you very much.
And sustainable negative growth, economic contraction, stopping breeding, the promotion of instincts for freedom, those sort of things...

But, in the meantime, to keep your pecker up, why not wander out into the spring sunshine and anarcho-happy-slap a banker today...

Arghhhh!!! The minutiae! Don't get wrapped up in the minutiae...

© Football is Fixed 2006-2012

Bookmakers Take Over England Team

A Scotsman and a Dutchman react to the news that Roy Hodgson is the new England manager

As England have decided to continue to fail miserably with the appointment of Roy Hodgson, we have decided to bring up this post (originally blogged on April 8th this year).

To compare...

Fabio Capello managed Juventus, Roma, Real Madrid, AC Milan and England. In that time he has won 7 Serie A titles, 2 La Primera Liga titles, 4 Supercoppa Italiano titles, 1 European Super Cup and 1 UEFA Champions League title. In 603 matches as a manager, Capello has lost just 89 - he has only lost 25 matches in the last decade.

The only consequential tournament won by Hodgson in the last 23 years is the Danish Superliga in 2000/01.

You were warned...
_______________________________________________________________________________

So Roy Hodgson wants the England job: "I could quite easily say there should be a clause in the [West Brom] contract that, if someone else wants me, compensation can be agreed."

This is not a good idea for England...
... it is only marginally better than appointing 'Onest 'Arry to the post.

When you appoint Hodgson, you get John Colquhoun too - Colquhoun has been the club agent to Hodgson at Fulham, Liverpool and West Bromwich Albion.

Colquhoun has been in this position once before when he was agent for Steve McClaren when the talentless one was manager of England.

Players represented by Colquhoun were shamelessly promoted onto the international stage - there were matches, for example, where all three goalkeepers in the squad were on the books of Colquhoun (David James, Chris Kirkland and Scott Carson) - whether this was a good idea when Mr Colquhoun is a professional gambler is a moot point.

England failed to qualify for Euro 2008 through a mistake by Carson under the watchful gaze of Wally Brolly Man. But the real idiocy preventing qualification came in the arrangement of a friendly match in Austria just four days earlier. This was needless and tiring although it did provide one benefit - Michael Owen, the man with the Timeform Squiggle, was injured and missed the Croatia farce.

Bookmakers close to the Colquhoun Set Up were trading on a draw at Wembley. The Three Lions only needed a draw to qualify and there was huge patriotic mug money on the England win.
Playing with the markets cost England a place in the finals.

And Colquhoun is Scottish! He already has a similar arrangement with Craig Levein, the Scottish manager, resulting in the promotion of more of his clients onto the international stage - for example, James Morrison.

Stuart Pearce might have his managerial limitations but he is not corrupt...
... and in a world where Football is Fixed, that is as much as one can expect of your manager.

But...
One England squad, three goalkeepers on Key Sports' books, one manager on Key Sports' books and an agent with a propensity for insider trading...

What a weird fluke!

Power and Corruption

Monitoring the evidence being given by Rebekah Brooks to the Leveson Inquiry is more than entertaining...
... the collusion in corruption between power and insiders is evident.

In the dim and distant past nearly two decades ago, I undertook a Ph.D in Economics - the title of my thesis was "The Impact of Conspicuous Money on Outcomes in British Horseracing Betting Markets".

In this thesis (which was sold on to a bookmaker as a High Level Consultancy), it was demonstrated that the results of horseraces were highly dependent on the money flows in the betting markets - off-course, in the ring and on the rails ie insiders rigged many many races.

Certain trainers and jockeys featured very prominently in the primary listing of suspect races.

Among these charlatans was horserace trainer, one Charlie Brooks...
... who, remarkably, is the husband of one Rebekah.

The same linkages may be shown to exist between, for example, certain mainstream media, some football managers, a range of bookmakers and a selection of referees in the Premier League...
... as we will prove to you prior to the conclusion of this blog on Monday next.

The Premier League Title - The Winner Is...

With Mike Riley and the PGMOB providing Howard Webb for Sunderland versus Manchester United and Chris Foy for Stoke City versus Bolton, Sir Ferguson evidently has not given up abusing the integrity of the title race.

Victory for Bolton will force QPR to remain keen and needing a draw at Eastlands - any other result in the Potteries and QPR effectively have nothing to play for.

The number of occasions that Walton (pre- disappearing act), Foy, Webb, Mason and Marriner have been selected for matches influencing the title race in the second half of this season is an outlier of some marked statistical significance.

Mike Dean officiates the City/QPR poker table...
... and this means that, despite the corruptions of the Reds, the winners of ScudamoreWorld 2011/12 are Manchester City.

Polychrysos - The Illusory Game of Exchange (A Flashback)

Of course, we predicted the oncoming Recession/Depression and the causes in 2007 but this post was originally posted on January 13th 2009 and was written as a state of play at the time.
___________________________________________________________________________________


The Illusory Game of Exchange, the Giant Poker Table where our Realities are determined...

In the previous post in our seasonal triptych, by focusing on the gathering Depression from the perspective of hedge-funds, Dark Pools, Behaviouralism, Darwinism and climate change, we outlined some of the reasons why a Deep Depression is our future.

Only time and space prevented us from venturing further into this systemic murkiness, and in the week since the post, there have been numerous further disturbing pieces of news that, under normal circumstances, would be headline-grabbing.
For example, the Bank of England reducing interest rates (and thereby eliminating its monetary options) to 1.5% - the lowest rate since the central bank was established 315 years ago. This is a statement of extreme historical weakness.
Or, the US economy losing more jobs (2.6 million) in 2008 than in any year since the 2nd World War.
Or the relentless conveyor belt of major job losses and fraud exposures on a daily basis (Alcoa, Satyam etc).

To begin this article, we intend looking at some of the other areas of non-sustainability that will guarantee the Deep Depression.

The Hyperreality (continued)

* Price-earnings (p/e) ratios - Bottom feeders are claiming that longer term investors are able to find value in the current market climate by taking advantage of the low p/e ratios in the marketplace. As stock prices have plummeted, earnings have, until recently, not fallen so far, as companies employ various accounting shenanigans to hide the true carnage from the balance sheets.
But earnings are about to go through the floorboards as the feedback loops and economic contagion poison the entire global economy.
Prices will follow.
The whole efficacy of p/e ratios as a potential measure of value in the marketplace is based on historical analyses and data.
Economists always look to the past for solutions, yet no economic hyperreality is replicable, which renders such research as quite pointless.
In a Depression, p/e ratios become an outmoded yardstick - systemic and super-systemic risk sees to that.
For this reason, there is not one global asset that might be thought of as offering sustainable value - any rebound is nothing more than an example of a dead cat bouncing...

Spokesperson for the Bank of England: "The world economy appears to be undergoing an unusually sharp and synchronised downturn."

* Ratings Agencies - All investors rely on the ratings bodies for a measurement of the level of risk within an organisation or a sector. These ratings are always inflated as any journey through the companies who either went into liquidation or were saved by governmental handouts in 2008 would demonstrate.
This is a systemic enigma built into the fake structure.
As the Economist states: "Although ratings are relied on by investors and regulators as impartial measures, the Rating Agencies are paid by those they rate for their judgments."
Think advertising - no newspaper contains negative editorial against its advertisers.
Think ratings - no Ratings Agency will downgrade an entity that is, in effect, paying the wages.
Some of the AAA/Aaa nonsenses standing proud at Standard and Poors and Moody's today, will seem just a trifle optimistic in less than twelve months time.

Jean Baudrillard: "... all current strategies boil down to this: passing around the debt, the credit, the unreal, the unnameable thing that you cannot get rid of."

* Private Equity - All the focus has been on the plight of the banks and the insurance companies, on the credit crunch and on the toxic assets, on targeting hedge-funds and on the state of the currency markets.
As attention has shifted to the 'real' economy (NB: it is our assessment that the ONLY Real economy is the informal one), the fake finance of private equity operations will come under increased scrutiny.
All firms under the yoke of private equity have been stripped of their assets and saddled with debt. With the current very real concerns about deflation this is very very bad news indeed.
When the Bank of England produced their Inflation Report on November 12th, the future spread of likely inflation rates projected negative values for the first time ever ie deflation.
Under a climate of deflation, indebted businesses (and households) will be more anxious to pay off loans and debts as soon as feasible.
How they are going to be able to achieve this is another problem entirely.

Jean Baudrillard: "The illusion of the economic sphere lies in its having aspired to ground the principle of reality and rationality on the forgetting of this ultimate reality of impossible exchange."

* Deflation - With the indebted desperately trying to pay off their financial millstones, a deflationary world is trouble as there will not be enough cash-rich entities to offset the activities of the indebted. This produces a deadly mix of falling prices and high leverage, leading to a debt deflation of the type first postulated by Irving Fisher in the 1930s.
And don't even get us started on the fine balance between deflation/stagflation tipping over into hyperinflation...

Jean Baudrillard: "Here and now, the whole edifice of value is exchangeable for Nothing."

* Moral Hazard - Moral hazard got us into this mess, and moral hazard is the template of choice to cement the Depression.
Excessive leverage, fake mathematics and accounting, all neatly wrapped in a regulatory-lite environment with no downside to the taking positions of excessive risk. Plus ça change...
Last week in the Financial Times, the war criminal called Blair admits to mistakes in his stewardship of the economy, but pleads for any reactive regulation to be as feeble as possible so that the innovation might be allowed to continue.
What innovation?
Credit default swaps? Derivatives generally? Ponzi schemes at hedge-funds? All very fucking innovative but of absolutely no value to anybody other than the psychos with their fingers in the till.
If such innovation had been put into Real research in medicine, science, rather than the myopic minutiae of available knowledges that are allowed to be marketed in this shareholder capitalist poker game, we would not be in this situation.
Still, its great to hear that the war criminal called Blair has earned £12 million from after-dinner speeches since he gave up his full-time post in applied genocide.

Friedrich Nietzsche: "One must push what is already collapsing."

* Emerging Economies - The new paradigmists, a particularly stupid breed of capitalist, reckoned that the emerging economies would rescue the US, the EU and Japan once the Recession began to bite. Yet all economies are declining in lock-step.
Furthermore, the shareholder capitalist model that has been foisted onto numerous gullible territories has been shown to be invalid.
So, for example, China needs to undertake some financial restructuring and recapitalisation. As the Economist states: "It would once have been easy to argue that a market-driven system served up by big western banks could do a better job of this than government. When virtually every such institution has been given state support to stay in business, that case is much harder to make."

George Soros: "If you need systemic change, you might as well go for something that is vastly superior."

* Credit Crisis - Although the record amounts of public money that has simply been handed over to the greed architects of this Depression has succeeded in freeing up some of lack of confidence in the financial system, the Real solidity so created is mainly an illusion. The Real economy will continue to suffer (British retailers experienced their worst xmas ever in 2008 and banks are refusing to pass on the interest rate cuts to businesses and customers) and banks will create a cycle of contagion whereby the businesses that they do support will be undermined by the complete collapse of the rest of the economy, with associated bad debts and further risk of toxicity. we should expect more hedge-funds and banks to go under this year.

Mark Twain: "Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."

* Governmental, Regulatory and Central Bank Errors - It is now generally accepted that allowing Lehman Brothers to go bust was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the ban on the short-selling of financial stocks was a short-sighted mistake.
It is now generally accepted that solely targeting the toxicity in the financial system was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the excessive financial support provided to insurance giant AIG was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the highly leveraged private equity model was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the lack of regulation in the free market was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the targeting of hedge-funds was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that giving the Bank of England control over the setting of interest rates was a mistake.
It is not yet regarded as a mistake that interest rates have been slashed to historical lows.
It is not yet regarded as a mistake that the financial industry is rushing to create secretive Dark Pools.
There are more mistakes to come from a financial elite (sic) who see the financial world solely through the prism of their own self-interest.

Satyajit Das: "Markets placed great faith in the volume of money available to support asset prices and assist in alleviating shortages of liquidity. The perceived abundance of liquidity was, in reality, merely an illusion created by high levels of debt and leverage as well as the structure of global capital flows. As the financial system deleverages, it is becoming clear, unsurprisingly, that available capital is more limited than previously estimated."

Trust, Psychology, Psychopathy

* Trust is one key component in the current crisis - nobody trusts the banks any longer no matter what their government-sponsored advertising campaigns may claim.
All analysts must judge the security of their investments, savings and cash, and correctly apportion their monies accordingly.
Taking sports brokerage as an example, we set a limit on the degree of trust that we place in our routes to market. Once a threshold has been set, we maintain our cash levels with the said institution below these levels AND we build into our financial projections the probabilities of brokers reneging on our agreements.
We are now at the point where we place banks at the same level of risk as our second tier brokers ie below the level of trust that we have in our primary level Asian brokers.
This breakdown in trust will not be easily repaired.
We don't know them and we don't trust them.
And we don't trust their system either.
As the Depression begins to bite in earnest, many more individuals are going to be reaching this same conclusion.

As Sigmund Freud once observed: "Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces."

* The Trickledown Effect - One of the great fallacies of shareholder capitalism is the trickledown effect, an illusory piece of fake mathematics that is solely dependent on the imaginary hyperreality of purchasing power parity (PPP). There is no trickledown other than in misery and psychopathy.
In a Depression, this Real trickledown effect is a downward spiral in the fake pyramid selling scheme that is our system.
The greed, the psychopathy and the mistakes were made at the top.
Our representatives bailed them out with huge handouts.
Moral hazard determines that the same greed, the same psychopathy and the same mistakes will be made at the top.
Psychopaths are unemotional and irrational - these two factors must go together as research by Antonio Damasio, professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, has shown.
There is a sufficiency of psychopathy among financial folk.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko: "When the truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie."

* Conclusion - As the fallacious system runs on in its empty sameness, the illusion must be replaced by truth, otherwise there will not be eco-system in which to continue to peddle the propaganda and lies.

Satyajit Das: "In this current financial crisis, the quantum of available capital, the munificent resources of central banks and sovereign wealth funds, and the globalization of capital flows may be some of the accepted "facts" that are revealed to be grand illusions."

Michel Foucault: "There is a battle 'for truth'... It is necessary to think of the political problems of intellectuals not in terms of 'science' and 'ideology', but in terms of 'truth' and 'power'... 'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A 'regime' of truth... The problem is not changing people's consciousnesses - or what's in their heads - but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth."

© Football is Fixed 2006-2012

Tangerine Tangerine Tangerine!!!

Foy and Moss!

The choice of the officials in this Birmingham/Blackpool event is akin to a rigged horserace.

Penalty denial against Ince at 0-0 and an offside goal for Zigic to lead to Brummie fightback.
Threatening to book Gilks for delaying goal kicks due to the shower of missiles.
Five minutes injury time for no injuries and 4 substitutions - where did those 3 minutes come from Moss...?
Ollie's instructions prevented any challenges by Pool in the penalty area forcing a degree of normality where a true outcome might reside.

But fuck you ######### with your fake degree and your match fixing.
Thinking you can play around with the sport just to add a few pennies to your mass of ill-gotten gains.
All other participants (fans, players, clubs, media, bookies) have to correlate reality with your private agendas.

Individuals are to be jailed in Italy for far less corruption than your psycho-shoddy operation.

And while we're at it #########...
How real is it to do the threats and menaces thing just because someone has rumbled your corruption?

Anyway...

Ollie Mourinho
Ollie Mourinho
Ollie Mourinho

Scudamore The Psychopath

In the old days, there was humour about the state of corruption within Italian football.

Now the tittering is about the rampant corruption in ScudamoreWorld - the Premier League Theme Park.

Serie A, Serie B, the Bundesliga, La Primera Liga (to an extent), the Dutch Eredivisie, the Champions League, the Europa Cup, the leagues in Portugal, Denmark, Sweden and even Russia have taken institutional actions that target the match-fixers.

Different territories utilise different tactics to confront the corruption but conspicuous by their absence from the List of Integrity is the EPL - the most liquid and most criminalised of all the major global leagues.

Very late release of refereeing appointments, targeting the insider traders' market activity directly, addressing frontline bookmakers, confronting the various mafiosi involved in such a money laundering territory, the banning of miscreants, the outlawing of late season agreed draws and numerous other regulatory actions and exposures are severely limiting the match fixers.

We have worked with a middling outfit in Serie A over the last two years and, even though Italy has created Calciopoli and Calciopoli The Sequel, at least the Italian authorities are recognising the elephant in the room.

Of course, Richard Scudamore and his Omerta Brigade recognise this mammoth corruption too...
... but Mr Scudamore sees such activities as libertarian free market neo-conservative exploitation which is all well and good in his diseased mind.

For Mr Scudamore doesn't only condone the fixing of matches in the EPL, he actively energises such corruptions in a wide variety of manners.

In Italy this month, around 50 players from more than half of the Serie A teams will appear before a sporting tribunal in order to answer charges over the rigging of matches.
In parallel, the Italian game has prevented the usual end of season shenanigans whereby mid-table teams settle for a share of the points whilst betting on that outcome - you may have an agreed draw now but you cannot bet on it voluminously.

"Even if the game is riddled with gambling, corruption, bad refereeing and secret agreements, well, in Italy everyone is at it," wrote political scientist Ilvio Diamante. "Everywhere. In politics, business, at work. Why be scandalised? That's life."

And so it is in England...

We could present Scudamore with more than 60 players and more than half the Premier League teams who are equally involved in the fixing of match outcomes for proprietary financial enhancement.
We could tell him which referees work with which team(s) and which bookmaker(s).
We could point him in the direction of numerous agents involved in match fixing via their clients.
We could point out the Dark Pools and private markets where these individuals rip off the sport that pays their legitimate wages.
We could show him betting patterns on named accounts to prove this.

And.
You know what...
... Mr Scudamore wouldn't blink an eyelid because this is not news to him, for he is the Great Orchestrator earning £1.5 million a year for overseeing the destruction of your sport, your game.

ScudamoreWorld - The Theme Park for Psychos.

© Football is Fixed 2006-2012

Enter Peter Lawwell The Hero?

Abusive Power Corrupts Absolutely

The decision has been made that, like the criminalised banks, Rangers FC are too big to fail.

As we posted yesterday, the outrage that Rangers will be allowed to continue (probably without ANY penalties) in the SPL will come to pass.

There will be no future points deductions.
There will be no continuing transfer embargo.
There will be no return of stolen trophies.
There will be no payments to creditors.
There will be no tax for the HMR&C.
There will be no convictions for fraud.

Rangers, in their omnipotence, refused to even attend the meeting of the SPL clubs yesterday to decide their future - they were in the Six Counties raising money in a friendly against fellow bigots Linfield FC...
... they did not need to attend as their negotiating position is being enacted to the letter by the SPL chief executive Neil Doncaster.

Doncaster is the equivalent of the Premier League's Richard Scudamore - the man makes up the decisions as he goes along, backing up his public stances with alleged legal opinion masquerading as legal advice.

Doncaster it was who announced firstly that the Rangers Newco entity did not have to reform in the lower leagues (the norm in such instances).
Doncaster it was who announced that the SPL has been given legal advice which says no points penalties could be imposed on a team re-entering the league in Newco form.
Doncaster it was who arbitrarily announced that there would need to be 5 objections to this reformation - as Rangers have a certain degree of control over five of the other SPL teams, this is a done deal.
Doncaster it was who persuaded the clubs to put financial well-being ahead of footballing integrity.

Doncaster: "I think that is entirely unfair on the owners who are concerned with the survival of their clubs..."

But...
... the clubs are only in financial straits because of Rangers abuse of the league, the cups, the transfer market, the betting markets and their ability to siphon off money from corruptions like throwing the Zenit St Petersburg UEFA Cup Final to continue to fund their illicit practices.

Ewing Grahame in the Telegraph: "There is, of course, some irony in a club who owe money throughout Europe for players they have signed but could not afford and who are being pursued by Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs for unpaid tax in the region of £90 million postponing a vote on this issue... This may give succour to Miller, who is so excited by his potential purchase that he has never visited Scotland. His reasons for wishing to own Rangers are unclear and it is not yet known whether or not he has any connection with the club’s discredited owner, Craig Whyte, the man who holds the floating charge over Ibrox Stadium and the training complex"

That will be the same Craig Whyte who used to run commercial projects with one of the administrators, Paul Clark.
And then there are rumours of Alastair Johnson in the background and, more criminal still, "the shadowy figure of Andrew Ellis has been a mostly unseen presence but he hasn't completely vanished from the reckoning yet."

Below are quotes from two lifelong Celtic fans on this massively corrupt situation (from kerrydalestreet.co.uk).
Fans across the remainder of the SPL are against the Doncaster Scam but they matter little.
The likes of Scudamore and Doncaster wish to get rid of the true fan and replace with the gullible, the addicted consumerist, the prawn sandwich, so that they might be able to continue to prise open illicit revenue streams without anything so discomforting as public scrutiny.

"Why pay any money to go and watch what is essentially a team following the rules versus the WWE XII whilst the rest of them sit back counting their 30 pieces of silver and wiping the sweat from their brows at the realisation their gravy train nearly came off the track? You would be subsidizing theft from our own shareholders and - by acquiescence - legitimising the biggest fraud in the history of football in Scotland."

"I always knew we were being cheated -- we all did -- but a great part of the joy of following the club was to be successful in the face of the sectarian cheating bastards. Bent refs and linesmen could disallow only so many goals, after all, and we continued to win trophies, though not nearly as many as we should have done, given the quality of the players we kept on producing. But there is a difference between knowing we were being cheated in the sense of being discriminated against, and finding out that the whole sport has been weighed up and formulated to make sure one team ALWAYS wins, which is what we now know to have occurred from the day and hour David Murray took over Rangers. We now know that the football authorities wilfully turned a blind eye when Rangers borrowed unsustainable amounts of money from a compliant bank -- financial doping -- in a desperate attempt to equal our two greatest feats. They achieved one of their aims. But if the rules of the very sport itself are now changed or ignored to facilitate the re-emergence of this disgusting, dead entity then I am done. This will be beyond cheating. This will be corruption on an industrial scale. If Celtic fight to face these bastards down, as Bob Kelly did in the Fifties, Big Jock did the Sixties, and MON did in the Noughties, then I will stand shoulder to shoulder with my beloved club. But if Celtic abstain or, unthinkably, vote for commercial reasons to allow this travesty to take place, then I will walk sadly into the night. I don't have that much time left that I can afford to waste it on wasters."

But we should expect nothing from certain characters at Celtic.
Pseudo-club agent John Colquhoun liquidated his music industry company with half a million pounds worth of debts and reestablished the company on the following day under a different name...
... with no debts and no creditors.

Although Rangers are criminalised beyond reconstruction, the tactic of ripping off the masses for proprietary financial gain is the modus operandi for influential individuals across football (Colquhoun is very close contractually to new England manager Roy Hodgson, equally close to Craig Levein and gambles on match outcomes professionally, for example). 

A Sham and a Scam.
A Disgrace.

A Fixed Match in England This Week

We have been shown information suggesting that the match between Birmingham City and Blackpool in the Championship Play Off Second Leg is fixed AGAINST the interests of the Seasiders.

Some people who think they are powerful wish for the Brummies to reach Wembley.

A club agent with close links to Chris Foy and 4th Official Jon Moss (the refs on Wed) wants Brum to get to Wembley because he is lining up Chris Hughton for the West Brom job - inflate the price and the percentage as part of the Fleece Peace Strategy.
See historical Football is Fixed posts for details of Mr Moss and his agent friend...

The Pool are playing against more than a team.

This is not a surprise.

Up The Pool.

Rigging, Regionalism and Rubbish

The Sousveillance of Ghost Goals

Okay so...

The Liverpool 'goal', by the rules of the game, was a Real Goal.

According to the International Football Association, "a goal is scored when the whole of the ball passes over the goal line, between the goalposts and under the cross bar." The outside of the goal is determined by the outermost edge of the goal posts and cross bar. If the ball does not fully cross the plane created by these three bars, a goal is not awarded.

But.

Given that the decision was tight, why didn't Phil Dowd, with his historical biases, even stop play and consult with his assistant?

And why didn't Martin Atkinson (18 Chelsea games - 15 wins, no defeats) do the same in the Semi Final?

Power corrupts...
... absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Player of the Year

After the idiocy of Scott Parker winning the Football Writers' Association Player of the Year in 2010/11, this year Robin van Persie was the recipient.

Why?

Neither team won a trophy via the influence of such a player.

The Football Writers need to occasionally head north out of their bars and casino and then they might witness Yaya Toure and Vincent Kompany.

Managerial Selection based on Who-You-Know and not Meritocracy

When the FA sacked Steve McClaren for being useless and, unwittingly or not, linked to the betting markets via his agent John Colquhoun, they considered replacing the English Wally with Jose Mourinho.

This would, meritocratically, have been the correct choice (if he had been willing to accept) but Fabio Capello was an excellent second choice.

Sensible strategy would then suggest undermining this manager in order to manufacture a return to mediocrity - the choice being between somebody who is fortunate not to be in jail and somebody who last won a tournament nearly a quarter of a century ago.

Ah! That winning mentality!
 
The fact that Roy Hodgson, unwittingly or not, is linked to the same John Colquhoun and the same betting markets is a deja vu of some clarity.

We predict Theo Walcott, Phil Jones, Jordan Henderson all to be in the England team or on the bench while Stuart Pearce will be pressured into ensuring Chris Brunt and James Morrison are in the Olympic squad.
There might even be a surprise recall for David James as an over age player.

And ###### ######## bookmakers will control the England betting markets.

Meanwhile, Steve McClaren yesterday celebrated his latest failure - he took over FC Twente when they were challenging for the Eredivisie title...
... they finished 6th, 16 points off Ajax.

Now that is meritocratic talent in motion.

The FA, like the Premier League, are compromised and not fit for purpose.

Gong!

After all the meetings, discussions, analyses, blogging and strategy, Football is Fixed/Dietrological warrant a Championship Medal if Manchester City overcome their handicap and pip the vastly inferior United to the title.

No shots on target at Eastlands, 1-6, the ###### of the FA Cup match refereed by Chris Foy - the ref at Old Trafford today...
... Ferguson risks bringing the game into disrepute in his desperate attempts to contort the blindingly obvious into a meta-criminal neohyperreality.

But remember, the Reds have 12 v 11 at Old Trafford...
... while the Blues face an extra man, away from home too.

A Recipe for Disaster - Liverpool FC

Take Tom Hicks and George Gillett.

Add Rafa Benitez, Roy Hodgson and Kenny Dalglish.

Mix in Damien Comolli and John Colquhoun.

Combine in an aesthetically and professionally displeasing dish including such sabermetric anomalies as Jordan Henderson, Stewart Downing, Jose Enrique, Craig Bellamy, Jose Reina, Steven Gerrard, Jay Spearing, Martin Skrtel, Daniel Agger, Glen Johnson and Luis Suarez.

Serve with a combination of agents having too much influence over team selection, inappropriate external linkages of core players and a propensity for ####### market activities.

This club is dysfunctional beyond belief.

A dessert of yet another Ghost Goal decision in favour of Chelsea by one of  ##### referees, doesn't redeem a few poor courses.

The decline of a once great club.

Manipulated Markets - The First Ever Post on Football is Fixed

This was our first blog from November 11th 2006.
It is dull!

Desperate for a pertinent question, how about "has anything changed in the five and a half years since?"

No!

Tessa Jowell proved to be ineffectual as did subsequent agents of the state - the acquittal of Harry Redknapp in February proving to be the final hyperreality on the power of the entirely non-regulated football industry.

But, on reflection, we feel that we misjudged the holistic in terms of the degree of corruption in the game.
It has proved to be markedly worse than we initially suspected!

"There are many honest people in the game" proved vastly optimistic!!

Organisations that hover between the white, grey and black markets were initially assessed as being beyond the pale when we explored potential collaborations.
But, that is as good as it gets in postmodern football for the simple reason that, when vast swathes of the industry are trundling around at the bottom of the barrel, one has to stretch the margins of integrity to compete.

Of course, this reward for psychopathy is one of the fundamental flaws with free market capitalism too...
... along with it being a Ponzi scheme in a non-sustainable planetary equilibrium.

We spent too much time seeking other entities similar to ourselves.
We were too naive and idealistic.

Socrates: "As for me, all I know is that I know nothing."

In the end we have compromised and will continue to do so.
It is a shit industry but we'll take our small and peripheral part of that shit for our efforts.

And, on that very point, no responses should be expected to the Consultancy on offer until the end of the month as we are otherwise engaged (http://footballisfixed.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/201213-consultancy-available.html).

Thank you.
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English Football is currently reeling from the impacts of the Stevens inquiry into the bung culture, the standard and ethics of referees and the revelation that Victor Chandler International allegedly took bets from some Premiership Managers and Players. The words “tip” and “iceberg” spring to mind.
I have traded professionally on global football betting markets for the past 15 years. In my experience, all the brokers, market makers and bookmakers that I have traded with take bets from insiders in the game. It is regarded as buying information. Undoubtedly, some of this exchange of information borders on the corrupt. The recent betting scandal in Germany and the uproar in Italy’s Serie A show that this isn’t merely a British problem.
Asian Market Makers regularly accept bets of greater than £1million without blinking (Gianluigi Buffon – the Juventus goalkeeper – was found with betting slips for several million euros in his possession during the Moggiopoli scandal). Inevitably, the liquidity of the Asian markets persuades some football people to enhance their earning capacities. To my knowledge, such individuals include players, managers, referees, bookmakers, agents and the criminal fringe. It isn’t just the Italian mafia centres of Napoli, Palermo and Reggio di Calabria that are actively involved in football markets!
To date, all attempts to clean up the game have been peripheral. In Germany, some selective sweeping under the carpet and wrist slapping went on in response to the referee Robert Hoyzer admitting that he took money to alter football match outcomes. But, I believe that there are other match officials in the Bundesliga who were merely demoted or, indeed, allowed to continue to officiate. In Italy, in the aftermath of calciocaos, two referees were suspended but the other six that were under investigation are still involved in Serie A.
Although there are many corrupt players, it is the match officials who are the key component of this crisis. Some have links to individual clubs, some to bookmakers and some to the underworld. There are also many honest people in the game who are just trying to do their jobs. However, until football cleans up its act, corruption will persist. Falling attendances in Italy and England are partially related to deficiencies in the sport on offer. Although the prawn sandwich brigade remain oblivious to anything, the true fans know when they are being short changed. The recent assertion by Graeme Souness that British football is “the most honest in Europe” is simply laughable.
Tessa Jowell, the Minister for Culture, is aiming to make Britain a clean and well regulated gambling environment. I fully support her and her Department’s efforts but such efforts must extend beyond the protection of the vulnerable and the targeting of company directors with criminal links.
The football authorities also need to take a lead in this area and not just in the betting arena. In the lead up to the last World Cup, there was a real concern within FIFA that Uzbekistan were going to make it to the finals. This would have been politically unacceptable. In the first leg of the Asian Play Off with Bahrain, the Uzbeks won 1-0 and had a penalty denied them by the Japanese official. FIFA ludicrously ordered the game to be replayed and a 1-1 draw resulted. Bahrain won through in the Second Leg on away goals – the official for that second game (obviously by chance in the light of recent occurrences) was a certain Mr Graham Poll!

© Football is Fixed 2006-2012

Scudamore Chats Shit

Richard Scudamore: "This [the Premier League] is what you get when you welcome in inward investment. Any other industry would be welcoming that inward investment. We should welcome it with open arms."

Being psychopathically inclined, Mr Scudamore does not get integrity...
... inward investment is not the issue, it is the sources of that investment that has ruined what he beautifully calls "his product".

Six owners and criminalised management at Portsmouth, the Icelandic Ponzi Scheme and 3rd Party Ownership at West Ham, 3rd Party Ownership at Man Utd and Liverpool, the sources of the money behind Birmingham, Reading, QPR, and Blackpool, Alisher Usmanov and other psycho-oligarchs with their vory, Stoke City/Bet365, West Brom/Bodog/Victor Chandler, Shinawatra and his blood money, the 'Cockney mafia' at Newcastle/Spurs, the 'Glaswegian mafia' throughout the league, the links between various clubs and Asian bookmakers, leveraged buy-outs yoking the game to the benefit of 'inward investment' for decades to come...

By the bookmakers, for the bookmakers...

Richard Scudamore is probably the worst thing that has ever happened to English football.
He is your very own Blatter.
And Dave Richards is his Jack Warner!

© Football is Fixed 2006-2012

Roy Who? Harry Who?

Roy Hodgson (36 years in management)
7 Allsvenskan Titles (Malmo/Halmstad) and 2 Svenska Cupen (Malmo) - all prior to 1990
1 Danish Super Liga (FC Copenhagen)
1 Danish Super Cup (FC Copenhagen)

Harry Redknapp (29 years in management)
1 FA Cup (Portsmouth)
2 Division Three Titles (Portsmouth/Bournemouth)
1 Inter Toto Cup (West Ham)
1 Associate Members Cup (Bournemouth)

Fabio Capello (25 years in management)
4 Serie A Titles (AC Milan)
1 Serie A Titles (Roma)
2 Serie A Titles (Juventus)
2 La Primera Liga Titles (Real Madrid)
1 Champions League (AC Milan)
4 Supercoppa Italiano Titles (AC Milan/Roma)
1 European Super Cup (AC Milan)
1 Coppa Italia Primavera (AC Milan)

Managerial Sabermetrics does not exist...
... mainstream media trash transforms your realities.

England - destined to fail again.

© Football is Fixed 2006-2012

Harry Redknapp and Mike Dean - Still In Love

We have blogged many times historically about Harry Redknapp and referee Mike Dean.

Mike Dean refereed Bolton v Spurs last night.
The match-turning opening goal is described in The Guardian: "The opportunity came from a questionable corner won after Rafael van der Vaart's right-foot effort was repelled, and Sandro appeared to handle the ball. The referee saw nothing wrong."

Mike Dean is 4th Official to a junior referee in Tottenham's next match at Aston Villa.

Why?

© Football is Fixed 2006-2012

Pep Guardiola on Spanish Referees

Pep Guardiola: "Did the referees decide the league? The season has been very long, and a lot of things have happened. We've kept quiet, but the images are there."

Our Referee Bias Index judges the tilt for and against teams based on sendings off and penalties (for and against) and foul per booking ratio (plus miscellanea like ghost goals etc).

In the Big Three Leagues (La Liga, Serie A and Premier League) only two teams have achieved a Referee Bias Index of greater than 70 over the season...
... Real Madrid and Manchester United!

The two most powerful teams in the world getting the most help from the match officials!!

Football is Fixed!!!

© Football is Fixed 2006-2012

Scottish Style Justice

Below is a link to the transcript from the conversations between Neil Doncaster, Jim Spence and Jim Traynor on BBC Radio Scotland.

It is taken from the excellent blog by Paul McConville - Scots Law Thoughts (http://scotslawthoughts.wordpress.com/2012/05/02/neil-doncaster-of-the-spl-on-bbc-radio-scotland-transcript-30-april/).

As Paul says: "If I was a Rangers fan, what Mr Doncaster had to say would have had me jumping up and down with delight."

True.
Except that we are not convinced that Huns do delight.

More revealingly, our contacts tell us that the Celtic hierarchy do not want Rangers to be demoted as it will demolish cashflow and that, after all, is what football is about.

© Football is Fixed 2006-2012

Al-Fayed And His Money Are Soon Parted - A Flashback

Over the next couple of weeks, we might be selecting a range of historical posts from the Football is Fixed blog - the blog was established in November 2006 but over 90% of the posts are no longer publicly viewable.

The post addresses some nonsenses relating to the transfer market.
It first appeared on January 5th 2009.

The Holistic Sabermetrics Project became the Enhanced Sabermetrics Model and this entity has been utilised by teams in numerous primary and secondary tier European leagues to gain value for money in the marketplace.

We bet Hodgson wished that he had plumped for Champions League finalist and gladiatorial forward Mario Gómez!
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This January Transfer Window promises to be the most unusual (and analytically complex) market since the buying and selling of footballers became a restricted process.

The transfer market is already a highly inefficient marketplace as numerous key holistic parameters are not taken into account in the player evaluations.
So, for example, a ridiculous amount of weighting is given to sabermetrics - a pseudo-science based on player statistics - while virtually none is given to the impact of corruption on match outcomes (and, hence, player values).
It was this rampant market inefficiency that persuaded the Dietrological Trading Team to establish the Holistic Sabermetrics Project eighteen months ago.

As market analysts, we seek out inefficient markets ie markets where all the information is NOT in the price. In any mature market sector, virtually all markets are inefficient due to the corrupt natures of the market infrastructures.
So, football betting markets and football transfer markets are central to our portfolio.

Last year, we held discussions with several different British entities about our Holistic Sabermetrics Project, but each operation had organisational or individual limitations, either due to a lack of professionalism or a fondness for criminality. Or both.
As the state of the corruption in English football is cartelised, to a very large extent, we decided to look further afield for an operation that chooses meritocratic routes as opposed to corrupt ones.

And our patience has undoubtedly paid off.
We are working, on a trial basis it must be said, with a leading entity from another territory.
We are providing a range of high level consultancy services - basic player evaluation based on the fundamentals and the sabermetrics; the role of the betting markets in any assessment of a player value; enhanced scenario analysis relating to the state of the global financial system and its effect on future transfer windows; the impact of the Recession/Depression, now and in the future; issues relating to currency volatility; the development of hedging strategies to minimise risk.

We detail these aspects briefly below, before we go on to look at the current transfer market in England and the role of corruption in this market, as we complete the post with a basic fundamental player assessment, stripping away the fake layers to determine the Real value of the player concerned, rather than the neohyperreal market value.
We could have chosen virtually any players but, because we like a good wind-up, we have selected Andrew Johnson.

Using fundamental parameters is obviously a vital input to any player rating. But, such parameters are also of limited value unless treated as a big picture whole. Percentage of passes that are successful over different distances, and the fitness of players, for example, are key.
But, think about this for a moment.
If you are solely going to base evaluations on such data, what if there are systemic impacts that render the data as corrupted?
It is of minimal value to utilise the basic fundamental data, although some much more interesting sabermetric analyses may be undertaken utilising a more configurative approach. But, even with such laterally thought experimentation, the major impacts on the transfer values are omitted from the analytical process.

A Real player evaluation may only be determined with a holistic approach, and this is why our Holistic Sabermetrics Project has received such interest.
Nobody else has access to the proprietary databases that we possess, and consequently, they all compete using the same over-rated and expensive sabermetric services eg ProZone, Opta etc.

Equally important in these financial times are the scenario analyses both with respect to the football sector itself, and to the wider financial system.
The transfer market is characterised by short-termism and kneejerk reactions are generally what passes for a strategy.
By modelling the manners in which the markets, the sectors and the global template might progress, Holistic Sabermetrics are able to place all transfer activity into a continuum, allowing for the buying and selling to be undertaken at the most appropriate time.

The Recession/Depression is also an elephant in the transfer teashop.
Apart from the obvious basket case/ potential basket case issues eg West Ham United, Newcastle United, Portsmouth, Chelsea etc, strategic planners like Abu Dhabi United are able to purchase, at inflated prices it must be said, by taking a longer term perspective.
But the Recession/Depression is going to have far greater systemic impacts than the short-term winners and losers in this current transfer window.

For a start, there is a bubble in transfer evaluations which has parallelled the bull markets in stocks and housing. The recent evaluations have been a case of buying at the top of a market, and that is hardly a sensible basis on which to build a trading entity.
So Fulham spent £31 million in the summer - it is our estimation that those assets have since depreciated by nearly 50%. This is partly because only fundamental sabermetrics were utilised in the transfer evaluations, and partly because the market has dropped by 30% since the last transfer window.
30%!!!!
In 4 months...

And the Recession/Depression will have increasingly greater impact until the Great Depression MkII has played out its secular bear market phase - around 2017, on current projections.
Consequently, all player evaluations must incorporate an adjusted view of history, a present state of play, and a future of probabilistic scenario analyses, which, when combined, will provide the ultimate modular approach to assessing player values and the timing of purchase/sale.

Currency volatility, counter-party risk, toxic 'assets', a freeze in the payment mechanisms, the prospect of publicity for the criminalities that are widespread in the transfer markets (eg third party agreements, agents working for both club and player, bungs, suitcases of money away from taxing eyes, and the imposition of a virtual slavery conveyor belt in West Africa, in particular) etc etc add further levels of complexity to the transfer market when viewed in the longer term.

As does the impact of the gambling markets.
There is a dichotomous neohyperreality to a corrupt player who is involved in short-selling his teams matches for his and his agents proprietary gain. For, although the said player is of minimal value to his club, he is of maximal value to the corrupt agent.
The mainstream media is the acquiescent party that allows this fallacy to be maintained.
Regular readers will be aware of the players who have been repeatedly mentioned on Football Is Fixed as being dodgy.
Regular readers will also be aware that it is these self-same individuals, with the transfer rumours and the ghost-written newspaper columns, who are able to maintain a high profile in the public eye, entirely at odds with the Reality of the corruptions perpetrated on the pitch.

The model that we have created incorporates all of these inputs, and more, and is robust.
You would be astonished at some of the player values that appear as outputs.

In the summer, Fulham paid between £9 and £13 million for the Everton striker, Andrew Johnson, who arrived at Craven Cottage alongside Bobby Zamora, another forward from West Ham United.
Both of these purchases were poorly judged on every level.
Firstly, as we mentioned above, Fulham spent heavily on players at the top of the market, meaning that all of their transfer payments were inflated considerably.
Secondly, Bobby Zamora has played 17 Premiership matches to date, and has scored precisely one goal. 'Nuff said...
But, thirdly, and of far more interest, is the case of Johnson.

Lets check out the hindsight initially.
In three seasons in the Premiership for Crystal Palace and Everton, Johnson had scored 38 goals in 98 appearances, and it was this goal/game ratio of 0.39 that persuaded Roy Hodgson to purchase.
But this figure is a fallacy, for 13 of those goals were scored from the penalty spot.
One goal in every four games is most certainly not worth the transfer fee.
Additionally, Johnson had secured zero goals in his 8 appearances for England.

As a comparison, we'll look at Mario Gómez of Stuttgart, who Fulham were also rumoured to be interested in.
In the last three and a half seasons in the Bundesliga, Gómez has scored 39 goals in open play from 66 games, and his market value was said to be around £15 million in the summer.
The club evidently made the incorrect choices.
Mind you, they also acquired Pascal Zuberbuhler who is, by some distance, the worst goalkeeper that I have ever set eyes on, so we should not be surprised at such nonsenses...

But the Real situation is worse than this.
In his first five games of the current campaign, Johnson failed to score.
In the next match (the internally corrupted match against Wigan, where Johnson 'presciently' wore a '100 goals' vest to celebrate this milestone, even though this was his first goal in over six months!), Johnson netted two pseudo-goals as the match was rigged.

So, in Reality, Johnson has scored 2 goals in fifteen appearances since moving south.
This evidently displays the dangers of i) trusting agents and ii) using simplistic sabermetrics.
For when we apply a Holistic Sabermetric template to Andrew Johnson, our model suggest that a true current value would be £3 million.
And, Zamora is worth even les...
As for Zuberbuhler.........

If they didn't have Jimmy Bullard and Brede Hangeland in their team, Fulham would be West Bromwich Albion.

© Football is Fixed 2006-2012