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Friday’s collapse
in global markets has left thousands of city high flyers face down in
the executive suite shag pile after throwing up against a basket of currencies..
The news that gargantuan US mortgage provider Fannie May’s gap had opened
up, leaving it dangerously exposed to curve shifts and spread widening,
proved too much for traders and investors.. “Its carnage out there” said Chuck Thrower, billionaire head of equity
cash trading at Bulge Bank. "Bush's obsession with Iraq hasn’t been
helping, but the widening of Fannie’s gap is the last straw. We’re in
a low-liquidity-driven death spiral, and the low liquidity is driving
it.”
Worse was to come. The already greying mood turned black on Thursday when
the left-wing candidate ‘Lula’, a male, won the Brazilian election on
a platform of poverty reduction, an end to unemployment and free health
and education for all. The US nosedived on the catastrophe, causing London
to bellyflop in sympathy.
Over the clamour of the derivatives dealing room at Macho Bank, trading
king Max Maxentius told me, “I’ve never seen anything like this in my
life. Its panic selling registering five hundred on the Richter scale.
If we didn’t already have a ‘Black Friday’, I think this would go down
as ‘Black Friday. We're all fucked.’”
The market turmoil which climaxed last week without precedent has been
given a befitting name. But next week will bring a new week, a new opportunity
for a fresh start, and new hope to those who found only despair in this,
one of capitalism’s roller-coaster’s most wild rides.
The Insider
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