Category — United Kingdom

In their Questions of the Week column, Foreign Policy claims that Britain’s newly elected David Cameron and Nick Clegg are the Doublemint Twins. Me and The Sundance Kid are offended. We are the real Doublemint Twins. There is no way Nick and Dave are anywhere near as suave as us, nor as good at making nice sketches of sandy blond passersby.

I was recently reading some older posts on Andrew Clavell’s Financial Crookery, and came across a post from early January on the decision made by Iceland’s President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson to let the so-called Icesave bill (with which Iceland agrees to pay back Britain and the Netherlands the deposits made by its citizens that were lost by its banks) be subject to a popular referendum that it surely would not survive. It didn’t, on March 6th 93% of voters wanted it dead, compared to a diminutive 1,6% who wanted Iceland to [Read more →]

Above: “I think this is a very good death”, Lord Katsumoto tells a perplexed Tom Cruise, soon to become The Last Samurai

Like Custer at Little Bighorn, Lehman Brothers bravely removed the possibility of surviving by means of a tactical retreat in case they were befallen by a great host of hostile Indians by making use of the now infamous repo 105 contracts. Andrew Clavell, author of Financial Crookery, posted an interesting article on how and why they work here. Especially recommended for those of our readers who aren’t working with or haven’t studied a lot of finance or derivatives.