Content about Finance

Matt Zames is the 41 year old co-head of fixed income at JP Morgan investment bank, and head of capital markets at the mortgage bank.

As the new CIO, he will continue manage mortgages, but he will also be placed in charge of $70 TRILLION of derivatives contracts.

Prior to joining JP Morgan, Zames worked for Credit Suisse, and before that, he was a trader at Long Term Asset Management (LTCM), the hedge fund which collapsed in 1998 after a $4.8 billion loss.

There will not be many of us unable to see that the handing over our national defence to corparations with foreign interests is national suicide. 

That is unless you are Bernard Gray, the Chief of Defence Materiel at the Defence Equipment and Support branch of the Ministry.

Whilst acting as an advisor to the Ministry of Defence in 2009, Gray compiled a review of  defence acquisition, in which he strongly recommended the privatisation of the Defence Equipment and Support Branch, by creating what is termed a Go-Co partnership.

So says Adam Posen, of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee.

What he really means is that the City of London would be much worse off, of course. Britain could not really be much worse off, after all. Increasing unemployment, a demoralised youth, collapsing social and health care, collapsing education, collapsing manufacturing, collapsing infrastructure and an inexorable descent into full scale dictatorship - the list is unending.

According to Greece's Kathimerini newspaper, the judge at the Justice of the Peace court based his decision on a 2010 law that permits protection for people struggling to meet their financial commitments. To date, this law has only been used to provide relief to the unemployed.

The lady concerned is a full time civil servant with three children to support. She and her family have moved back with her parents. The court decided that she needs €350 per month to live on and that the remainder of her salary should be distributed between the four banks she owes money to.

It's there.

It's there in the half trillion Euros pumped into an already dead European financial system at Christmas by the European Central Bank. It's there in the half trillion Euros that the ECB is going to pump in next month. It's there in the trillions upon trillions of dollars pumped into the system by the Fed, and the hundreds of billions of pounds pumped into system by the Bank of England.

In the case of supermarket cartels like Tesco, whose aggressive commercial behaviour is throttling the life out of what remains of the independent UK retail sector, not to mention our farmers and producers, and have recently courted controversy with their decision to rescind their charity contributions to Cancer UK in favour of funding disgusting spectacles of our national moral decline like Gay Pride, we can only rejoice at the news that £4 billion was wiped off their share price yesterday, following “disappointing” Christmas sales figures.

Ireland, Spain, Italy, Greece or Hungary are each quite capable of lighting the fuse that sets off the Euro bomb any time now.

Today, "officials" from the "Troika" - the IMF, European Central Bank, and EU - are visiting Dublin to review its loan programme to Ireland.

As part of the visit the delegation will peruse Irelands books, to see how the country has performed against the Troika's demands for austerity. They will also outline which hoops Ireland will have to jump through in the coming three months.

The Euro fell for a fifth week against the dollar this week; its longest losing streak for nearly two years. It also fell against Sterling, the Australian Dollar and the Yen, where it is at its lowest level for eleven years. What happens next depends on the European Central Bank meeting on the 12th January.

An analogy suggested to me, which I think is perfect, is to compare the financial system to a ship: naval architects invented watertight compartments in order to stop the ship sinking when holed. Full separation of retail and investment banking is equivalent to the watertight compartments and is the only way to guarantee the ship won’t sink. The ring fence idea is not watertight - there’s a gap at the top, just like the unsinkable Titanic.

So Osborne's big idea is out in the open now. It's called "credit easing", and it's not quite what it seems to be.

Media commentators are presenting it as a much needed shot in the arm to British business. No longer will they have to go cap in hand to unsympathetic bank managers, who cannot lend them any money, because they don't have any money to lend. Now, they can issue some corporate bonds, and swap them for cash at the Bank of England.

But what does this mean, for the country and for the companies who take part?

The European Central Bank's "European Systemic Risk Board", a committee set up last December to manage the degree of panic in the system, began really stoking things up a couple of days ago, in a press release issued following their third scheduled meeting. They warned of a "rapidly rising risk of significant contagion [which] threatens financial stability in the EU as a whole".

Other quotations from various sources include:

You need a lot more firepower to be a circuit breaker!

With typical sophistry, the IMF has announced that the global economy has entered a "dangerous phase", as if it hasn't been in a terminal phase since 2007. They have downgraded their predictions for "growth" and warn that continuing political and economic problems in the USA and Europe could push these regions into a "double dip" recession. Whoopie-doo.