A film on the financial crisis called 'Inside Job' is being released in cinemas now/soon.

Stephanie Flanders (BBC economics editor) gave it quite a good review, and it rates 8.1/10 on IMDB:

Newspapers are reporting that the US have arrested a Credit Suisse banker for the usual tax haven stuff. Looks like things will get more interesting as the net spreads?

They were actually speculating in the papers that he got arrested for previous work at UBS, but that could just be the CS PR trying to ease the burden on themselves...

That was not the spin in the FT story; but who knows which way it will turn.... Certainly the guy was at UBS until about 2 years ago.

What about the fact that US hedge funds are calling in security services to do electronic sweeps of their trading rooms, because they're afraid of being spied / wiretapped from Uncle Sam?

The whole net can only grow wider and wider. The problem is that the Establishment protects itself by infecting the political environment. Nobody is clean enough, so most of the guilty parties are left untouched :-/

P.

Fab quote in trailer "There's nothing we can trust in any more" or like that.....regrets we have to trust some of the world's infrastructure like banks, sort of like..... will this road go off a cliff around the corner? we cant drive wondering that. UBS have given me grief with their slowness and incorrect answers for a year. This made huge pot holes in my road where I have been stuck spinning my wheels. THANK YOU to this forum I have been able to get moving, but every bend in the UBS road is a cliff hanger, they can't get our basic tiny account sorted, among other things.....like roads, its the small tiny tracks that get forgotten or prone to mis management.....but often these tracks do lead up wonderful paths to glorious views. I hope UBS do not go broke, I have to trust in one bank. With another bank (not Swiss), after 11 weeks I got back 200CHF equiv. bank fees they had taken in error from me....bottom line, banks are businesses, so they can go broke, they are not simply an infrastructure any more. But I do appreciate knowing from this Forum the health of UBS.

'Inside Job' won an Oscar: http://ca.reuters.com/article/entert...71R10220110228

Indeed. The people whose opinions really matter.

a GR8 doco style, very scary, USA looks in pretty shakey state, weird how the perpetrators get elevated into politics and being paid soooo much. What is it with their desire for more? why wouldn't they go R&R on an island or alp somewhere? how much is enough?
Recent ME/Oman unrest could also test US sphere of reach- I wouldn't have guessed Omanies would protest, they are among the peaceful ones in this Gulf area.

How's UBS protocol in the USA? any tsunamies we need to know about in UBS please?

Unusually frank statements by King before the commons treasury commitee:

Ditto here.
I was part of a local "anti-crisis" group here in Ticino in 2009-2010.
Besides voicing the most obvious anti-capitalist rants (and clichés), most of the members were actually unable to comprehend the vastity of the problem and/or its implications. They were also unable to coalesce and/or work along with other groups and therefore to attain some sort of critical mass. At the end of the day, things now are worse than in 2007-08 - and still no meaningful reaction (except for the infamous Rat campaign (www.balairatt.ch)) is to be seen.

IMHO some sort of bottom still needs to be reached in order for the ordinary Joes and Janes to react more forcefully.
But by then they will probably have been manipulated by this or that populist figure... which leaves me equally concerned about any possible outcome of that anger....

Paul

__________________

It is surprising that people are not out in the streets like they currently are in the Arab world.
As was said, people have not really grasped the size of the issue or how long it will last.

OK, I agree that in general the West has had a fairly tough couple of years, but to compare to the Arab uprisings is probably a little bit far. Most Europeans and Americans are still living a very comfortable life - we mostly have jobs (and are supported by the state if we don't), we can afford to eat much more than we need, we live in pretty decent houses or apartments, we are protected by a non-corrupt police force from serious crime, we can mostly take a holiday from time to time, and we can afford to spend some money on our pastimes.

In contrast, the trigger for many of the Arab revolts seems to be food prices - these dictatorships have oppressed their people whilst skimming off any available wealth for the tiny elite and leaving the masses literally on the bread line, such that many of their people are struggling daily to survive.

I am not particularly surprised that the revolts are happening in the Arab world whilst nothing much is happening in the West. I agree that lack of regulation of some financial markets probably caused the mess we are in now, but most Westerners are still living a very comfortable life so political apathy is not surprising.

And what has caused the rise in the price of food? I'd argue that it has been - at least in part - the commercial banks and hedge funds who have jumped into the commodities markets, using the mountains of cheap money originally provided by the central banks to bail the commercials out of their own mess.

I quite agree. As I said:

My point was that the lack of riots and uprisings in the West is unsurprising given the relative comfort we still live in (despite the financial crisis and its aftermath) when compared with a large proportion of the Arabic dictatorships which we are discussing here.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to disagree with you - I was trying to say that it's all interconnected.

The large proportion of the Arabic dictatorships have been put in place and supported by the west since we deposed the democratic government of Iran in 1953 for BP, up until Blair's meeting with Gaddafi and the release of the Libyan bomber. The purpose of this has been to maintain our cheap oil lifestyles.

Part of the recent revolutions has been a reaction against this, but this general resentment seems to have triggered by, as you say, food prices.

Of course, one of the lynchpins of western control of Oil has been the Saudi dictatorship. According to this wikileaks US cable, Saudi was already having enough problems pumping enough oil to keep a lid on prices before this crisis. Now they've had to go to their full production capacity because of the disruptions elsewhere. Over the past few days the Saudi stock market fell nearly 7 percent on tuesday, and nearly 4 percent yesterday.

Let's hope for the west that there aren't any problems in Saudi, because then price of oil will skyrocket. But then, let's hope for the people in these dictatorships that they get their freedom.

It's quite ironic that the crisis and subsequent rise in oil was triggered by food price rises, in turn caused by western money printing.

That's a new kind of cost push inflation!

Patenting seeds doesn't seem to be a bright idea either:

The Seed Gestapo And Third World Farmers

US Patent on New Genetic Technology Will Prevent Farmers from Saving Seed.

stopping seeds from re-producing is a path to self destruction - what planet are they on? Saudi still has the upper hand as they can decide to sell thier oil in Euro if they want....their huge under 30 age group suggests they need to increase thier food supply stream.....what if Saudi sold thier oil in CHF? how much gold does UBS have to back up a change in reserve currency?

Rats! Inspector Carver's rumbled us again.
First us financial fat cats tried to buy up governments, then we tried to bankrupt the world; now we're trying to starve it to death!

Okay it's a fair cop. Food price inflation. Here's how we did it.
First we engineered a massive explosion in demand from India, China and other developing nations. Yep, that was all down to us bankers.
Then we secretly built massive weather machines which wreaked havoc around the world's bread baskets causing fires in Russia, droughts in China and devastating floods in Australia.
Then we got our puppet governments to stockpile food supplies to protect their populations.

It was a perfect plan guaranteed to push up prices. Increase demand and keep supplies low. Simple. Are we Evil or what?

Actually, we bankers aren't that bad. All we intended to do was push up wheat prices high enough that people would have had to take out loans to buy their daily bread.

Oh well. Back the drawing board. At least nobody's rumbled that it's us bankers wot's causing global warming. (Well, at least not yet).

PS
A lot of the activity in the derivatives market is hedging risk - on both sides of the market. Producers trying to protect themselves from falling wholesale prices; consumers trying to protect themselves from rising wholesale prices.

NOT an original plan of bankers to use grain as currency....Joseph did it in Egypt and the nation sold themselves into slavery to be able to eat.....global warming is a red herring.....price of ????