And The Greed Goes On

It's estimated that around €30bn was lost by Hedge Fund Managers on a single stock recently as the frenzy to fuel greed continues. It seems despite the financial condition of the world, some people are hell-bent to keep the good times rolling while banks and even countries fail.

Beetle Crushes Man

You couldn't make it up.

Several Hedge Funds greedily shorted VW shares recently only to be left reeling when over the weekend Porsche announced it owned 74% of VW shares not the previously assumed 46%. The extent of the calamity was revealed on Monday as Fund Managers scrambled desperately to cover their positions, after VW had become the most shorted share in DAX history. To their added agony only 6% of VW shares were available to buy and in the process VW shares went as high as €1,005.

To put that into perspective, on Friday the shares had closed at €210 and by Monday they resettled at €945. At one point VW was worth €296bn and had become the largest company in the world ahead of the oil giant ExxonMobil.

And You Never Guess What

As the whole saga unravelled shares in German banks and good old boys like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs dived as much as 12%.

There were inevitable claims that Porsche had profiteered and that German regulations were a joke as Hedge Fund Managers desperately tried to justify their losses to which Porsche merely blamed those who had chosen to invest billions in shorting the VW share price.

Crisis? What Crisis?

As we slither inevitably toward recession and the world squirms in the grip of a financial crisis that various sages have compared to a global banking collapse, bankers and Hedge Fund Managers behave as if nothing has happened. Losing €30bn is a single weekend is just senseless and beyond the comprehension of most.

On the same front page of The Telegraph Business Section yesterday we were told that business failures rose 28% in the last quarter and so far this year 16,591 businesses have failed in the UK. Just to make sure we all understand how a recession works, we see that the cost of freight shipping has collapsed from $234,000 daily rentals to $7,340 - world production and trade is grinding to a halt.

So, after all the much slathering and rhetoric by angry politicians and citizens, why are we allowing such obscene amounts of money to be lost and gained in a financial activity which most abhor?

A single share. A single weekend. €30bn lost.

If We Don't Understand, What About.........

As we sip our tea and read the business sections and get worked up that such scales of money can be lost and gained in such a short time on such a simple matter, what on earth chance or do people in The Third World ever have? We struggle to provide aid or free drugs to treat diseases because we don't have the budget mainly as its unpopular with voters. Besides, globally, around £4.5 trillion (read it again carefully, that's 4,500 billion pounds) has been spent in propping up the failed banking system due to the kind of systematic greed I refer to above, so we sure don't have the money spare to save the Third World, bankers come first. The kind of money that makes the Afghan and Iraq war budgets seem like pocket change, although I may argue the lives lost are worth far, far more.

A World Gone Crazy

We have lost all sense of perspective. How can anybody allow this to happen after what we have learnt in the last year?

And why do we provide such vast sums of money to bail out banks just to allow them to continue behaving in the way that brought them to their knees? This is OUR tax money being collateralised to save their rich executive skins and this is what they do?

For Gordon Brown Alastair Darling, Hank Paulson and George Bush - the main people who stood up and said we should bail out these greedy people - this is what you get, and frankly most lay people would have told you so had you bothered to ask. All we wanted was depositor monies, our pensions, life assurances and banking products we had bought saved - we did not want the greedy world of banking to continue the way it did. Without a single vote cast, you used our tax money to borrow to fund the bail out telling us a pack of lies in the process.

Clearly we are too thick to understand the complex world in which we live that provides us with so much in the 'civilised world'. Try taking your pretty graphs and complex glossaries to the destitute and starving of Africa. Life is far less complicated there.