Apologies to regular readers of this blog for long absences. I blame the British Chancellor, the fine Spring weather and the ennui brought about by unrelentingly dismal economic news. Better to remain silent, methinks.
However, enjoyed a moment of light relief last night, at the launch of Gillian Tett’s new book: ‘Fool’s Gold‘ at the Financial Times’ offices. She’s a star Gillian Tett, and over the years taught me all I know about the alphabet soup of CDOS, derivatives etc….It meant ploughing through the company report pages of the second half of the paper, but today, thankfully and rightfully she occupies a pedestal on the main pages.
Met several whistleblowers, including one that had been given very large sums of ‘fools gold’ by RBS to take the fraud he had uncovered, and to travel far, far away. He was very jolly, very wealthy, but got bored sitting on his very own beachfront playing with his blackberry, he told me, and so was back consulting and advising on derivatives trading. Knowing that he would soon be paid very large sums to find another very large house on a remote beach……..
It interests me that Gillian Tett started life as a social anthropologist observing Uzbek tribesmen in the remote Hindu Kush. There she
developed the theory that you found out the really interesting things about a society not in the areas everyone was talking about, but the areas no
one was talking about – the silences. When she joined the FT she used exactly the same analysis on the City and dived into hedge funds and CDOs and
CDSs etc.