BBC Traders Series Seeks Ethical City Boys
THE City’s faulty and entirely ineffectual regulatory systems are not to blame for the money markets crash. All that singing Malteser, dried-up women and Brothers grim, Gordon Brown’s heroes.
Oh, not. It’s all those City traders and their short selling, which is not illegal. But, still, let’s ban it and then we can all sleep easy.
What we need is a new breed of trader. Death to the old.
History attests to the fact that financial crises bring out the worst in the masses, and the action taken by the FSA is nothing more than vigilante violence on a national scale. Problems in the economy? Let’s find a scapegoat. Too difficult to blame the real culprits? Let’s pick on a minority, surround their homes with flaming torches, and drive them out into the wilderness.
And in the nick of time, here’s the new BBC show. It’s call Traders. It features what TV nodding heads call “real people” - a housewife, a student and an ex-marine - trying to earn oodles of cash on a pretend trading floor.
BBC executive producer Emma Willis tells us:
“Traders is a hugely exciting project, and interest in the City is at an all-time high. This programme will offer viewers a fascinating insight into how this usually secretive world operates at an unprecedented moment in history.”
Secret?
You mean the post-Big Bang City, anyone can trade shares at home?
Series producer Anthony Phillips goes long:
“We were keen on people who could do it intellectually, but not in a self-serving way.”
How very BBC. See if you can make money, but not really. Taxes take care of that. Money, well, it’s so very vulgar…
Posted: 19th, September 2008 | In: Money, TV & Radio Comments (3) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
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September 19th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
And if you want to know how E. Stanley O’Neal, the former chief of Merrill Lynch managed to exit with $161 million, notwithstanding having tanked ML, then ask the ghost of John Kenneth Galbraith:
“The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.”
September 19th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
And that would be Seth Freedman reporting from the hub of the world’s financial markets, every sense honed down the decades to detecting those tiny flickers that can make the difference between triumph and disaster, would it?
No, that would be Seth Freedman ‘a writer in Jerusalem’ who appears to know f*ck all about what is actually happening in the markets but isn’t allowing his total ignorance to deter him from writing articles in the Grauniad about it.
If you want to know why short selling might not be a bad thing then read the article by Michael Lewis on Bloomberg:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aJ48_bPSf8F0
And bear in mind that before Michael Lewis became a full time writer he was a Salomon Brothers bond salesman, back in the days when Salomon Brothers ruled the world, or at least the bits of the world which were worth ruling…
September 19th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Traders!
A sort of “The Apprentıce”, wıth Del Boy playing Sır Alan Sugar.