SECTION THREE, PART SIX

CONGRATS. THE ARSEHOLES WIN. If you are reading this, then you are already dead!. Wht a joke! Doesn't the social contract talk to the acceptable behaviour of the population. Fifteen issues to come.

SECTION THREE, PART FIVE

Sliding Doors: The One that Shut on Lehmann. At almost the fifth anniversary of the September 15th bankruptcy, the trick is not so much a retrospective, as more like a "roast". What was it about Lehmanns that marked their card, when it was just as easy to line up Goldmans, Morgan Stanley, and Merrills, just as easily. For those with some corporate memory of the period, foreboding of doom, of " we will need to let one of you fail" had been floating around the markets for a few months prior, without providing any hint of which one would first go. Certainly, corporate and interbank lending had been experiencing straitened times for a number, if not six, months prior to September. That the risk management departments hadn't had multiple apoplexies by September would have to have been poor reflections of their roles. I can remember, using the existence of the Australian trading day hours to remove Lehmanns as a counterparty for some lines of business, prior to the formal closure at midnight, NY Sunday. A lot didn't move as quickly. But intrinsically, what about Lehmanns that led to such arbitrary decisions as to punish WaMu, cut Lehmanns as the poster child, save Merrills, and sucker the population with AIG, not to mention then lead to such distorting behaviours as the policy decisions of Paulson/Bernanke during the if " we don't do TARP, the whole world will implode". Such monumental, and arbitrary decision making, with unaccountable decisions, for unaccountable reasons. All done under the mask of necessity to save the banking system....strangely, to save the investment banking industry more like it. All we have had, is significant wealth transfers, underwritten by taxpayers, and those who became unemployed, and with no right of reply. And the inevitable, and companion piece banking fallout in other jurisdictions, who did not even have a Lehmanns, or a similarly obnoxious equivalent, playing a highly leveraged, poorly funded, investment banking model. THE US IS NOT AN EXAMPLE OF RIGHT THINKING RECTITUDE HERE, and so should have been thrown out of the global financial system, through the freezing of all its cross-border activities. The US will forever regret the arbitrariness evidenced during 2008, and the inevitable decline of the US dollar as a reserve currency, due to the overprinting during the unconventional policy period, just as sterling's eclipse was an inevitable feature of its dumb decisions.