That just goes to show how stupid and ill informed people are.

Glass-Steagall, and particularly the artificial split between retail and investment banking, would have done nothing to prevent the crisis. Bear Stearns went bust - pure investment bank. Lehmans went bust - pure investment bank. In the UK, Northern Rock went bust - pure retail bank - just too bloody stupid to secure long term funding. Ditto HBOS. In the US, Citi was in trouble due to the mortgages it sold - not because of it's investment banking and trading activities.

And don't talk to me about AIG. When you have people who get paid a lot of money to understand what they're buying, it's their fault if they don't.

No it wouldn't. But kale derivatives? Kale? ? What on earth are you talking about?

And if we must discuss brassicas, wouldn't brussel sprouts be more seasonal?

Bouncers in the UK don't have tasers

I don't think you quite understand what a Ponzi scheme is, but derivatives certainly aren't one.

Investing in gold is arguable more like a ponzi scheme than derivatives are. Gold has no intrinsic value, and provides you no income - it only has a value if you can find some other sucker that buys it off you. Hopefully for more than you paid. Or not. Oops.

Differential equations are wonderful, and it's great you understand them, but clearly they're not that useful for calculating percentages.

You might also want to investigate concepts such as hedging, realised and unrealised PnL (Profit and Loss), and what happens to your PnL when it turns out that your hedge was made up. It's not difficult compared to differential equations.

But why let facts and understanding get in the way of a good rant, eh? ... snip...

Institutional Investors like pension funds don't care about the long term? Okay, we're not talking long term like millenium clock long tern, but actually they do care very much about the long term.

They also care very much about the short term because individual investors care about the short term, and will take their money out and put it elsewhere if an institution has a couple of quarters where it does badly.

Plausible deniability - or more precisely, CYA (Cover Your Ar....) is, of course, extremely important.

Because he consistently, over decades, paid out an outstanding, reliable return on their money, and it was actually quite hard for an unsophisticated investor to understand why that wasn't kosher.

Better questions are: Why did professional investor invest with him? (answer: A lot of smart ones did not!) Why didn't the regulators act on the numerous tip offs?

No, because to the risk management system it looked like he was flat risk. He wasn't "making" anywhere near the amount of money that he later lost.... and it looked like he was well hedged. The flaw was that the system didn't spot that the hedges were fake.

I'm quite sure that retail banks rarely do that, but you underestimate investment banks. Where do you think all those really bright physicists end up - there are only so many jobs at CERN et. al.

There are a lot of psychopaths, and the concentration increases the higher you go. That's probably true of a lot of organisations, but is a particularly pronounced effect in investment banks. That, and their incentives are misaligned.

Only a very small fraction of Christians - even evangelical Christians - insist on taking every word of the Bible literally.

Sadly, that fraction is very vocal, and concentrated in the US

> 2- People are too lazy to drive down to the polls and wait in line to vote.
There will also be people who are too lazy to vote electronically, or too busy because they're voting for something "important" like x-factor...

If you don't care enough to vote, that's your choice.

I think the problem is more with 1

> fiercely competitive around here
Move?

Great, I'll try that. I'll start by thinking of your money as mine.

> When people are out of "civilised" ways to put across their message, they resort to violence
It's 2011. There are a gazillion ways to put across your message, completely for free. You're using one of them right now.

> It's only the selfish and greedy who need fear this crowd, no matter what colour they are.

So owning a shop, or living in one of the flats that got torched, or perhaps owning a car that got burnt, makes you selfish and greedy?

Well, if you're well enough to loot, surely you're well enough to work? ;)

The problem with incapacity benefit is largely that it's been used for years by governments to massage unemployment figures down. It is simply inconceivable that there are 3 million people in the UK who are completely unable to work.

As to housing benefit, it is being capped at an extremely high level; IIRC you'd have to earn something 1.5 * median income to have the same amount left over after taxes (and don't forget that if you get housing benefit, you're likely to be "entitled" to other benefits on top).

London is extremely expensive; lots of people can't afford to live there. It's hardly fair to take money away from working people who already have to commute from outside London to support people who want to live there, but expect others to pay.