Motor Racing And Gallery Motor

No, this week's Wally isn't Russell Brand or Jonathan Ross (that would have been far too obvious), but a creature named Seth Freedman (pictured above).

Seth who? I hear you ask. Seth has written a quite hilarious- and at the same time disturbing piece for the Guardian's Comment is Free website in which he berates the British public- and the media - for taking delight in the plight of hedge fund managers who lost billions by short-selling VW shares.

The media have seized with glee upon the plight of hedge fund managers who have lost billions by short-selling VW shares. knowledge and comprehension of the events at hand were sacrificed in favour of uncontrolled delight at the outcomes.
The background to the VW affair is simple enough; what is less easy to comprehend is the kicking the press and public have meted out to the losing traders whilst they were down......
much-maligned minority of hedge fund managers – widely believed to be the root cause of all evil by arch-socialists, archbishops and politicians alike – are treated as social pariahs, mocked and ridiculed at every turn, whether they make or lose money.

Freedman whinges.

Then, in an extraordinary paragraph, he writes:

The public's refusal to acknowledge that traders and fund managers have also suffered during this spell of market turmoil means the market players are unlikely to feel compelled to offer much sympathy to the public's plight in return, sympathy that many commentators are demanding be extended by the City on an almost-daily basis.

So there you have it. Unless the public (that's you and I, dear reader) show more sympathy to the plight of those poor, poor 'market players', they're not going to show much sympathy to us.

Freedman, a former City trader clearly sees it as a battle between the Masters of the Universe-ie 'the market players' and the rest of us. We'd better show them some respect and stop laughing at their misfortune, or else.

I don't think any article I have yet read on the financial crisis demonstrates the extraordinary arrogance of those who 'play the markets' as much as this one.

They really do think they are a breed apart from 'the public' who instead of spending their days 'short-selling' companies actually do things which add to the wealth of the country.

It's good to see Freedman's disgusting article receive a mauling from CIF readers.

But I'm pleased he's written it: as it shows quite clearly the arrogant, elitist mindset of those who have it all their own way, for far too long.

UPDATE: It seems that Seth Freedman is carving out quite a lucrative little career for himself writing about such matters. Readersread.com report:

Viking have signed the former stockbroker turned writer Seth Freedman for "an insider account of greed, corruption and excess in the City", due next April. A mix of memoir, reportage and interviews, Viking hopes it will reveal the extent to which risking millions every day can be addictive, as well as explaining the inner workings of the market from short selling to bonds swaps.

Editorial director Joel Rickett paid what he described as a "healthy five-figure sum" for the book,

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Sometimes you read news stories that want to make you want to jump for joy.

This is one of them.

"I have had hedge fund managers literally in tears on the phone," said one London-based analyst yesterday. Others likened the Porsche disclosure to a "nuclear bomb going off in our faces", describing the resulting losses as "a bloodbath".

Hedge fund managers in tears? To quote the legendary RSM Williams (above):'Oh Dear, How Sad, Never Mind.'

UPDATE: Philip Delves Broughton has more in his great piece for the First Post
The geniuses at Porsche have just done what half the civilised world has been thinking of doing these past few weeks and stuffed it to hedge funds

FURTHER UPDATE: You really couldn't make it. You really couldn't, dear reader.
The DT reports on the anger of the hedge fund traders who have been shafted by Porsche:

One said “In any other country in the world, taking control of a company in secret and still not launching a bid would be illegal. We believe the reactions of the German regulators to be criminally irresponsible but we are confident that this will be sorted out.” Another said: “We are stunned by the unregulated nature of the German market. This is a complete fiasco. Forget buying a Porsche, traders around the world will simply avoid Germany after this.”

Yup, that's right. Hedge fund traders, who for years have railed against greater regulation of their highly secretive industry, and against government regulation generally, now attack Germany for the 'unregulated' nature of its market.
I told you, you couldn't make it up. I don't have enough money to go out and buy a Porsche to express my appreciation to the company for the service they have rendered us all, but I know which country Zsuzsanna and I will be going to on our next holiday.

Three cheers for Germany!

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Today's First Post reports:

As the stock market plummets and house prices slump, Tony Blair, the man who as Prime Minister championed the "light touch" system of financial regulation blamed by many for the current crisis, is enjoying an unprecedented boom in his fortunes. The Times reveals today that the former Prime Minister's earnings in his first year since leaving Downing Street topped £12 million, more than six times his previous lifetime income.

The lion's share of his income does not come from his various advisory jobs, but from the lucrative international lecture circuit where he is now said to be the highest-paid speaker in the world. Since his first gig last October, Blair is understood to have earned £5.3m, which is even more than Bill Clinton did in his first year after leaving the White House.

Blair, who works exclusively through the blue-chip Washington Speakers Bureau, is certainly popular – there is currently a two-year waiting list for bookings, with clients prepared to pay $250,000 for a typical speech of roughly 90 minutes.

In my 2007 Spectator review of Geoffrey Wheatcroft's book 'Yo, Blair!' I wrote:

By his endless war-making, he has destroyed one English tradition which had found a home in the Labour Party — the radical tradition of pacifism and non-interventionism. And by his attack on ancient civil liberties, carried out in the name of the ‘war against terror’, he has destroyed another — the liberal tradition.

Why was it all done?

Blair’s apologists would like us to believe that their man acted out of conviction, but the truth may be rather more prosaic. The going rates for retired politicians on the American lecture circuit are impressive: Bill Clinton gets $250,000 a time, and Blair, as Washington’s most loyal lapdog, will certainly be at the top of the scale. In addition, there are those lucrative book contracts. As Wheatcroft concludes, vast numbers of lives may have been cruelly sacrificed by the Iraq enterprise, but Anthony Charles Linton Blair will surely be a richer man as a result.

Anyone out there who still thinks Blair acted out of 'conviction'?

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This piece of mine appears in The First Post.

It was the ex-communist country that did everything the West and its neo-liberal economic 'experts' said it should do. It privatised vast swathes of its economy. It allowed free and unhindered access to Western multinationals. It filed up obediently to join Nato and the EU and employed Goldman Sachs to give advice on privatisation.

Now, after 20 years of free-market 'reforms', Hungary, together with the Ukraine, sees the results of its policies: an IMF bail-out.

Hungary's economic collapse gives a lie to the dominant narrative that eastern European countries have thrived since the sweeping political changes of 1989.

I lived and worked in Hungary during the 1990s and saw at first hand the way that the economic 'reforms' insisted upon by the IMF, the World Bank and the EU adversely affected the majority of the population.

Ten years on, and times are even tougher. On a recent visit to Hungary I was shocked by the increase in street beggars and the number of old people I saw searching for scraps in trash cans.

Away from the swanky new Budapest bars around Liszt Ferenc Ter and Vaci Ut which cater for foreign businessmen and home-grown yuppies, the capital has a shabbier, poorer look than it did a decade ago. The fall in living standards became even more apparent when I visited other towns and cities in the country.

The statistics paint a depressing picture. Last year, real wages in Hungary fell by seven per cent. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation has reported that 200,000 people in Hungary, including 20,000 children, are under-fed. One in five children are being brought up in poverty, while campaigners predict that recent price hikes of electricity and gas could push a further 3m people into poverty.

The truth is that Hungary, like the Ukraine, has gone backwards, and not forwards since the fall of communism. Even Viktor Orban, the staunchly anti-communist leader of the main conservative opposition party Fidesz, has conceded that for the majority, life was easier in the relatively liberal 'goulash' communism era of the 1970s and 80s.

Despite the selling-off of millions of pounds worth of state assets in the government's mass privatisation programme, Hungary's public finances remain in a poor state. The scale of corruption has been mind-boggling: Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany (pictured above) - whose 'pro-reform' economic policies have been lauded in the West - has an estimated fortune of £10m, made from controversial privatisation deals in the early 1990s.

The new IMF loan, far from being the salvation that Hungary's political elite is claiming, is likely to make things even worse. The IMF is insisting the government pursues 'strong policies' to reduce its deficit - shorthand for yet more swingeing cuts in public spending. That would mean the final nail in the coffin for the country's chronically under-funded health service; my mother-in-law had to bring in her own toilet paper during a hospital stay this summer.

The IMF loan is also likely to mean the enforced privatisation of the few assets remaining in state ownership, regardless of widespread public opposition.

"What's the difference between communism and capitalism?" is the joke currently doing the rounds in Budapest. Answer: "Under communism we had a big government debt but we lived well. Under capitalism we have a big government debt but we don't live well."

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They're at it again. You know: the country that thinks it's above international law and believes it has the right to bomb, threaten and bully anyone who doesn't tow the line.

Yesterday, four US aircraft travelled eight miles inside Syrian airspace from Iraq and killed eight unarmed civilians on a farm.

The Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem said those who died were a father and his three children, a farm guard and his wife, and a fisherman.

"We consider this criminal and terrorist aggression. We put the responsibility on the American government," Muallem told reporters following talks with UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband. "All of them [the victims] are civilians, Syrian, unarmed and they are on the Syrian territories. Killing civilians in international law means a terrorist aggression."

Killing civilians in international law certainly does mean a 'terrorist aggression'.

But what have Britain and America's neocon writers- normally so quick to denounce 'terrorist' acts when they are committed by swarthy people with beards and moustaches, have to say about this blatant act of state-terrorism?

Absolutely nothing. Their silence is matched by that of the US Government.
And Britain's puppet government too.

The BBC reports:

Mr Muallem and Mr Miliband were scheduled to hold a joint press conference, but Mr Miliband withdrew. The UK government has declined to comment on the raid.

Next time you hear a neocon talk of 'terrorism', and the threat it poses, just remind him or her of yesterday's events in Syria, and ask them why they failed to condemn it.

Meanwhile in Syria, anger is growing at the US aggression and at the Syrian government's lack of a military response.

"The people who were killed were harmless, they should have been protected. It is a very saddening experience. People talk about patriotism, but when it comes to action - nothing happens"

says one Syrian eyewitness to yesterday's terrorist action, as reported on the BBC's website.

Many are of the opinion that the US administration gave the go-ahead for yesterday's attack hoping it would draw a Syrian military response, which in turn would lead to a major Middle Eastern war: something which we know the warmongering neocon faction would love to bring about. We undoubtedly live in dangerous times and, as I've said before on numerous occasions, we will continue to do so unless the advocates of perpetual war are removed from anywhere near the corridors of power.

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So here we see our new, one-party elite in all its lack of glory, interchangeable careerists from fake ‘Tory’ and fake ‘Labour’ front benches, floating around in lukewarm seas of money with Russian oligarchs, hedge-fund millionaires, foreign media magnates and who knows what else?

This, the Corfu set, is your choice at the next Election. You can have one thing, or you can have the same thing. If you want anything else, you can get stuffed. These individuals have no interest in you, or in this country, nor much idea of how the rest of us live. It is centuries since Britain was ruled by a set of people who have so little in common with those they govern.

What they’re really embarrassed about this week is that you might realise that this is what they are like. Peter Mandelson (above) is less troubled than George Osborne because nobody would be surprised by anything he did, or anyone he met. If Peter turned up in North Korea having cocktails with Kim Jong Il, it would be Kim’s reputation that got damaged.

But it is much worse for the Tories. They have spent millions (raised how, exactly?) on buying themselves a nice new image. Now they fear that the whole lot has gone down the plumbing.

They tried so hard to avoid this. David Cameron even had a pseudo-holiday in Cornwall, where he posed for pictures, before heading off for his real holiday in Yachtworld, where he wasn’t so keen to be seen.

How it makes me yearn for the much-mocked old days of the grouse moors, and even Harold Wilson’s expeditions to the Scilly Isles. Our political leaders may not have been much good but at least they were ours, not the trashy flotsam of the global elite.

writes Peter Hitchens in his excellent article in today's Mail on Sunday.

As regular readers will know, I’ve long argued that in Britain we live in what is to all extents and purposes a one party state. Does anyone out there have any doubts after this week’s revelations about the goings-on of the Corfu set? It‘s also interesting to compare Peter Hitchens’ observations, with those of Martin Kettle in The Guardian. Kettle, nominally a man on the ‘liberal-left’ wrote on Friday:

“The Rothschild pad is presumably at the luxury end of the market, but so what? Are politicians - Labour politicians in particular - not allowed to have rich friends?

Once again the Corfu revelations- and the reaction to them- have shown that the 'old’ left and the 'old' right have far more in common than they do with today’s globalist political elite and their media apologists- such as Martin Kettle and The Times' Chief Leader writer Daniel Finklestein (who after describing the Corfu revelations of his own newspaper as a 'non-scandal', then embarrassingly did a 'somersault')

PS: One small point I would take issue with in Peter Hitchens' brilliant post though (and David Lindsay makes the same observation) is his line that our political leaders in the immediate post-war era ‘may not have been much good.’ The likes of Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson were actually very good- especially when you consider that unlike Prime Ministers from Thatcher onwards they didn’t have the benefit of the bonanza of North Sea oil. Harold Wilson was a particularly effective- and under-rated Prime Minister; (as well as being an exceptionally nice man), whose record looks better with each year which passes. And as Peter mentions, he spent his holidays on the Scilly Isles, not in the villas of the global financial/business elite.

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The word 'genius' is often overused and as a result it has lost a lot of its meaning. There are very, very few people to whom the epithet can accurately be applied: but songwriter Burt Bacharach, responsible for writing some of the greatest popular songs of all time, is surely one of them. Bacharach is in Britain to promote his new album and on Wednesday he performed at the BBC's Electric Proms in London. If you weren't there, or missed the tv recording, you can watch the concert, in full, at the BBC Electric Proms website. If you haven't seen the concert yet, you're in for a real treat: it's amazing.

Above you can watch a tribute to Burt and his great songs, from December 1967. Among those performing are Liza Minelli, Sergio Mendes & Brazil 66, Wes Montgomery, Herb Alpert (the compere, and brilliant trumpet player) and of course the maestro Burt Bacharach himself. Enjoy!

p.s. in addition to being a musical genius Bacharach is fiercely critical of the Iraq war. What a star!

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