Own a hedge fund, fund a fascist. Somehow everyone forgets that the 1,000 year Reich lasted 12 years. You'd think it would take all the fun out of funding. But no.
A second fund, GLG Partners, which declared its ‘short-selling’ in Bradford & Bingley in June, is managed by Belgian Pierre Lagrange, whose wife Catherine has given £50,000 to the Conservative Party.
Both Mrs Lagrange and Mr Hintze are members of the Leaders Group, which grants access to the Tory leader and his inner circle in return for a £50,000 donation.
The links between Mr Cameron and the City of London figures dubbed alleged ‘robbers in pinstripes’ emerged after a team from Channel 4’s Dispatches programme obtained the names of the 100-strong Leaders Group.
The programme, being broadcast tomorrow, identifies Paul Ruddock and David Craigen of Lansdowne Partners, who have given £260,000 between them, as among seven hedge-fund members of the group.
What's that all about?
Bradford & Bingley,nationalised
Liberal Democrat treasury spokesman Vince Cable said: "There doesn't seem to have been a white knight in the offing. The alternative otherwise was just to let the thing go bust and protect the depositors".
....and of course the hedgies, and their protégés.'Now we see that the same hedge fund wolf pack who brought HBOS to its knees are bankrolling the Tory party,'
Hedge fund managers whose donations entitle them to membership of the group include Michael Hintze of CQS, who has given £662,500 and whose organisation shorted shares in Bradford and Bingley. Two other men who qualify as members of the group are Paul Ruddock, who has given almost £210,000, and David Craigen, who has donated £50,000. The pair's investment firm, Lansdowne, was exposed last week as shorting shares in HBOS.
So why didn't [the banks] see what was coming?
The answer, writes Rob Jameson, answer lies partly in the nature of liquidity crises.
So, on top of huge salaries and opulent bonuses, do we give them a pass - and more money - for this sort of, cough, cough, miscalculation, as explained by Michel Crouhy ..[..] author of a standard text on financial risk management.:
[...] each liquidity crisis is inevitably different from its predecessors, not least because major crises provoke changes in the shape of markets, regulations and the behaviour of players.
Liquidity crises are rare, extreme events, so all the models you rely on in normal times don't work any more"
On top of this, banks wrongly assumed that two areas of vulnerability could be treated in isolation, each with its own risk model. When the two areas began to affect each other and drive up banks' liquidity risk there was no unifying framework to predict what would happen, explains William Perraudin, director of the Risk Management Laboratory at Imperial College London.