Monday 23rd of December 2024
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psychopaths .....

psychopaths .....

Meet the London trader who is making headlines for all the wrong reasons. As the Greek economy verges on collapse and European leaders move to head off another recession, Alessio Rastani told the BBC overnight:

"I'm a trader, I don't really care about that sort of stuff. If I see an opportunity to make money I go with that. So most traders, it's not about, we don't really care that much how they're going to fix the economy, how they're going to fix the whole situation, our job is to make money from it. And personally, I've been dreaming of this moment for three years. I have a confession which is I go to bed every night and dream of another recession. I dream of another moment like this. Why? Because, people don't really seem to remember, but the '30s Depression, the Depression in the '30s, wasn't just about market crash. There are some people who were prepared to make money from that crash and I think anyone can do that ..."

Richard Farmer today points to a Swiss university study, as detailed by Der Spiegel, that concluded market traders are more reckless than the rest of us and perhaps "more manipulative than psychopaths".

Or to quote the startled BBC interviewer in response to the now-famous markets expert: "Jaws have collectively dropped at what you just said. I appreciate your candour, but it doesn't help the rest of us does it, or the rest of the eurozone?"

The Collapse Is Coming...And Goldman Rules The World

 

yes John...

a very sorry state of affair:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/7603#comment-16983

 

see also pass the parcel

casualties of war .....

''The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers,'' wrote Shakespeare in Henry VI, Part 2. Merchant bankers had not been invented then.

But we are stuck with them now, pin-striped armies of financial predators who have wrought more havoc upon the Western world than ever al-Qaeda could hope to achieve.

The greed, arrogance and stupidity of the breed was starkly outlined by a self-styled independent trader named Alessio Rastani, interviewed in London by the BBC this week.

''Governments don't rule the world - Goldman Sachs rules the world,'' he announced. ''For most traders, we don't really care that much how they're going to fix the economy, how they're going to fix the whole situation. Our job is to make money from it. I go to bed every night and I dream of another recession, I dream of another moment like this.'' Rastani turned out to be a wannabe nonentity, but he stuck his finger on the guts of it.

We have the same attitudes here. As the stockbroker Marcus Padley wrote in his Business Day column in last Saturday's Herald, ''In the stock market, taking money off fools is expected, taking money off innocents is applauded and ruining the lives, retirements, school fees funds and futures of families is an accepted no-recourse 'casualty of war' ''.

Exactly. To the victors the spoils. And even when they're caught they get away with it. When Stan O'Neal, the boss of the Wall Street firm Merrill Lynch, destroyed the company in the subprime mortgage crash of 2008, he copped a $US161.5 million severance package funded by the American taxpayer and he now sits on the board of Alcoa.

So what to do with the bastards? A brick wall and a firing squad might be a good start, shooting a brace of them as an example to the rest. Or stocks could be set up in Chifley Square, where they could be pelted with ordure. Their spouses should be publicly insulted at charity luncheons and tennis mornings, and their children banned from private schools to stop the contagion spreading to the next generation.

Mike Carlton