Financials / Editor / 28 October 2008 / Leave a comment

ONE of the nastier sides of the way the titans of Wall St shafted anyone in sight is emerging; investigative reporters at Bloomberg have put together the sort of story which is so nasty that people are refusing to return their calls.

Arranging the issue of municipal bonds for schools, local authorities and the like provide a modest income to banks like Tony Blair's employer's at JPMorgan, and obviously if you are a Big Swinging Dick then modest profits are unsatisfactory.

So instead they put together a series of highly complex derivative products in a web of intermeshed financial instruments and told the municipals that these were perfectly safe and would be a much better deal than the old fashioned and boring issue of bonds.

Of course, since they were hugely complex the bank got a much, much bigger fee than it would have made on boring old fashioned bonds.

You probably have guessed what's coming next: the derivatives turned out to be not perfectly safe at all, so much so that large numbers of schools and local authorities are being hit with crippling demands for money which they don't have, and the poor bloody infantry, the taxpayer, will have to foot the massive bills.

Meanwhile banks like JPMorgan get lots of money from the US Treasury, which will get that money, as well, from the poor bloody infantry, the taxpayers.

I wonder what has been sold to British local authorities?

So while the schools worry, and the bankers worry about their nippers' schools, the FTSE hovers around the 4,000 mark and waits for a cut in interest rates do make it do, well, something.

But it won't boom overnight. Boom and Bust is not dead (tell that to Gordon Brown), it is merely in mid-bust...