Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Boil the Hedge Funders' Heads
Forgive me, but, as a nation, is there any good reason why we should not tell the hedge funds RAB Capital and SRM Global to go and boil their heads? They filled their boots with Northern Rock after the crash and now they're doing a little agitprop among the shareholders. I use the word 'agitprop' advisedly because, as I have said before, the sudden belief in the financial community that the state should underwrite all shareholder risks is communism. As far as I can see, the shareholders have no special rights. They punted and lost. Of course, none of this would be happening if Gordon Brown could overcome his lifelong habit of indecision. But he can't.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
I was at school with the AB part of RAB and a more unimaginative, dull brained and arrogant idiot it would be hard to find. But even then his sense of entitlement was well to the fore. My older brother takes pride in declaring that AB was the last person he ever punched in the face, and adds that he achieved a general round of applause after the act.
ReplyDeleteYour brother, Recusant, sounds like a fine man.
ReplyDeleteThere is nothing like a recession to help a capitalist get in touch with his inner socialist.
ReplyDelete'Unimaginative, dull brained and arrogant' - but he's worth a few bob. As PJ O'Rourke once observed, Beverley Hills is full of Croesus-lke cretins whereas in Soviet Russia chess grandmasters were boiling stones for soup. But wherefore Mr Appleyard's visceral loathing? Mention a hedge funder and his elberry-like animosity kicks in.
ReplyDeleteHe doesn't like them eating in restaurants. Perhaps they throw bread rolls around.
ReplyDeleteAs Alexander Pope (I think it was) said you can tell what God thinks of money when you see the people he gives it to.
ReplyDeleteHow true, Mr. Walling. And one of Bryan's favorite novels, "Gilead," bears that out.
ReplyDeleteQuestion: Who is AB? When I saw RAB, I thought "Richard Branson," but I believe he's just the guy who may bail out --er, buy out -- Northern Rock.
Bankers and their shareholders have a well-earned worldwide reputation for demanding someone else bail them out of problems and losses entirely of their own creation. They are almost always successful because their good friends are running the government, or at least the agencies responsible for keeping an eye on them. (I thought the portrayal of the shenanigans of the fictional Sir Desmond Glazebrook in Yes. Minister was spot on then. Even more so now.)
ReplyDeleteThat said, it is a rare opportunity to sit back and enjoy the multi-billion infusions of capital, at heavy discount) into those too-big-to-fail giants, Citibank & Merrill, Lynch.
What a delicious irony that El Gordo, the great Scottish man of probity (and which Scotsman doesn't claim the moral high ground) has trumpeted his acievement of a sound economy for the last eleven years when in fact it's built on spivvery, usury and vast amounts of borrowed money. Brown is no less of a con man than Blair, although with one difference - Blair never appeared really to take it terribly seriously, whereas Broon is deadly serious. His purpose is to build state socialism and it doesn't really matter to him if the road is rocky along the way.
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