sutton038

Hiss... In 2010 Rolling Stone's  Matt Taibbi infamously referred to Goldman Sachs as a  Vampire Squid , a term that has since then become something of an overused meme (even Taibbi has expressed ambivalence about it). He's but one individual who's tapped into disturbing imagery to describe Goldman though: For example, the other day I picked up  Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs came to Rule the World   by Steven Cohan, repleat with a golden snake on the cover, poised to strike. The sentiment was echoed by Alesio Rastani , the trader who upset everyone by saying Goldman rules the world. I have no doubt that Goldman is a powerful company, and yes, they've been involved in some corrupt-as-hell deals (check out Senator Carl Levin's scathing report about them), but I sometimes suspect that the public hype around the company merely helps to reinforce it's existing self-image - presented in sanitised form in their graduate recruitment videos - as a reposit...

I know what you're thinking: How on earth would I be able to read, let alone rank, 100 blogs? The answer is simple: I have a METHODOLOGY!... and it's about as scientific as a model used to work out the value of a junk-bond backed CLO. Yes, I've taken something completely subjective and added a spurious quantitative element to it. Given that this is standard practice in the financial industry, there should be no problem. The Methodology A category like 'financial blogs' is somewhat loose: I've included blogs that focus on analysis of financial news, blogs that waffle about trading and investment strategies, and more general economics blogs that provide analysis relevant to financial markets. Personal finance sites though, are excluded, so no Mint.com. The methodology is based on 3 voting rounds, during which points are scored. Let me explain... Voting round 1: The List-Makers As a starting point, I sought to identify four pre-existing 'best of' lists that...

BEAR STEARNS (2008) DIMON: "A PIECE OF ART CLOSE TO MY HEART" I have many artists in my family - for example, my mother creates psychedelic textile art , and my uncle  Stidy is a political cartoonist  - but I feel over the last few years that I've been giving too little attention to the dark arts of art. So, welcome to my first exhibition. It all started when I was messing around with one of those demotivational poster generators . I was reflecting on the sad greatness of the now departed Bear Stearns, and Shakespeare came to mind with the speech of Mark Antony , when he says "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears, so that I can sell them to an investment bank that wants to securitise them". One thing led to another, and I created my first masterwork. I called it simply,  Bear Stears , but it is now known amongst collectors as  'ear 'ear . When I first put it out for auction on Ebay, the piece wasn't well understood, it's meaning opaque ...

I have no family in the UK, so I always exhibit strange behaviour on Christmas day. Last year I wondered around the City of London and took photos of empty bank offices, after which I attended a wedding of two Occupy protesters on the steps of St. Paul's cathedral. This year I wandered around Brixton and took photos, including one of the  Space Invader mosaic above the chicken & chips shop on Coldharbour Lane, before going home to watch THREE whole films on the fall of Lehman Brothers. GANDALF VISITS MORDOR Lehman has always held a special place in my heart because I had two interviews there in 2008, mere weeks before it collapsed. I sat up on the 36th floor and was questioned by men whose job it was to ascertain the robustness of my character. One of them said "you may have heard things in the press about us being in the shit, but these are the exaggerations of melodramatic journalists". A week later I was having another interview there, but little did I know t...

[Note: An up to date blogpost about the book appears here , and the book's page is here ] This blog has been on the down low over the last few months because I've been writing a book. The book is now finished, 78 579 words aimed at   providing a gateway for an individual to gain access to the matrix of global finance. It's called The Heretic's Guide To Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money .  It will be published in May 2013 by Pluto Press , a fantastic independent publisher based in Highgate, London, who have published such societal shitstirrers as Noam Chomsky , Edward Said , Vandana Shiva , Susan George, and John Holloway, amongst others. I've often found that I'll read an interesting book providing a critique of the financial system, but then I'll put it down and that's kind of the end of it. I store the info away somewhere and pull it out during a conversation maybe, but I don't really act on it. Thus, when Pluto approached me to write a b...

The ease with which the Libor scandal has brought down the towering figure of Bob Diamond, master of the universe and investment banker extraordinaire, is truly momentous. It reveals how small cracks in corporate structures can turn into gaping chasms that engulf whole management teams. For those that haven’t been following the scandal, the gist of it is that traders have been caught submitting inaccurate figures to manipulate the Libor rate – an index which tries to reflect the average rate that banks can borrow on the 'interbank market' (aka. from each other) – for various dubious schemes. Libor relies on banks submitting honest figures to the British Bankers Association (BBA), the organisation that calculates the index. Interestingly enough, I was at a debate a few weeks ago on the topic of financial sector corruption, which pitted investigative journalists Ian Fraser and Nick Kochan against a representative of the British Bankers Association. Kochan and Fraser argued th...

[Note: for my more recent article about bitcoin, see How to Explain Bitcoin to your Granny ] By now many people will have heard about Bitcoin. That’s the global, decentralised, online crypto-currency (check out this Wired Magazine article for some background). You can either buy it on online exchanges , or your can ‘mine’ it by running algorithms that are likely to cause your laptop to catch fire. You can then use it to buy things from vendors who’ll accept it, albeit Sainsbury’s still only accepts British Pounds. There are even mainstream currency traders who actively trade Bitcoin now . I’ll bet all the Bitcoins I have though, that very few people actually understand what the hell Bitcoin is. I myself do not understand it. Try listen to this guy explain it, and feel your mind frazzle. More than anything, I have the sense that Bitcoin is a cult . A strange cybernetic cult. An anarchic techno-pirate, quasi-mystical collective on a dystopian mission to subvert the global monetary sys...