Leveller

Foreign Secretary with Tzipi Livni, originally uploaded by Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

A mere 10 days after shaking hands with the renowned war criminal Tzipi Livni. On the BBC Andrew Marr show the British Foreign Secretary, William Hague further prostitutes his sorry arse, to Banking interests declaring that “belt tightening” is needed by all the worlds proles to compensate the impoverished Bankers that caused the mess.

governments controlling their debts and deficits would be the solution.

Jailed for 5 months, by Manchester Magistrates, for accepting a pair of looted pants.

Judge Andrew Gilbart QC said he was setting aside the prison sentence because Nevin had not actually taken part in the riots.

Wikipedia: today's stone age

Wikipedia is mostly stolen content, paragraphs of text cut&paste from books of years gone by. The editors there can do no better, all they are allowed to do is copy the words of others, and due to copyright concerns the ones stolen from ought to be dead a long time ago. As a result the most favoured works are centuries old, and sometimes you come across a gems like this from the 18th century:

1. Birch rifled the bishop’s palace and afterwards took up his habitation there until the Restoration.

The US Federal Reserve bails out AIG with almost $100,000,000,000 as its stock value crumbles. But what has brought this giant of insurance down? The answer appears to be that the value of AIG’s investments known as Credit Default Swaps (CDS), apparently these are supposed to be a form of insurance policy (AIG’s business is insurance) against bad debt.

At the end of last year concerns were being expressed that the value of these insurances were grossly overestimated resulting in a write down of $4.88 billion.

It seems that not only was AIG’s insurance risk assessment lacking but their Crisis Management Services just wasn’t up to the job either.

Over the last couple of decades companies like AIG have charged huge fees, and paid themselves massive bonuses, for advising on, and selling derivative investments like Credit Default Swaps.

Today many suspect these derivatives are worthless.

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From the BBC:

Liberal Democrat leader “No Shit Sherlock” has pledged to tackle “bad practice” in the City of London as he outlined plans for a better system of regulation.

The current turmoil is due to thieving by the financial institutions, at the moment we are focussing on the write downs that the banks are announcing, but in the end they will mostly recoup these ‘losses’ by selling the repossessed properties. In reality the losers are the poor in the USA who were duped into signing mortgage agreements. This whole fiasco is the largest transfer of equity from African Americans to City Financiers since the ending of slavery.

This isn’t the first time that financial institutions have been caught either. There was miss selling of pensions on the 1980s, miss selling of endowment mortgages in the 1990s, and now these sub-prime mortgages which sounds remarkably like Savings & Loans mk2.

You’ll hear the pundits, politicians, and industry apologists excuse the behaviour, they’ll tell you that no one could have foreseen it, and that extra regulation isn’t the answer. Well may be it isn’t, what we should do is pick ten or twenty of the leading bankers and chop their thieving fucking hands off.