| An early list of those who are thought to have lost out in Bernard Madoff’s alleged $50bn scam.
Fairfield Greenwich Group – $7.5bn (company statement) Societe Generale and UBS – confirmed insignificant exposure. Deutsche Bank AG, Dresdner Bank AG & Commerzbank AG – declined to comment on the matter. |
Amidst all that bad news of failing financial institutions, and news of mergers and acquistions, now this. Is there no end to the bad news surrounding the finance industry? Is this a wake up call to everyone, that all that wealth is nothing but an illusion, nothing more than just numbers – a figure printed on a piece of paper and that it will get wiped out just like that? Just where will our money be safe? 50 billion (50,000,000,000) U.S. dollars. That’s roughly 73,800,000,000 Singapore dollars. And you know whenever I look at these staggering amounts, the pay of the Tali-PAP mini$ter$ is really ‘peanuts’. Just how the hell did he pull it off? And it’s not a new idea or some really ingenious scheme. It’s something that has been done before – a Ponzi Scheme – which is nothing more than a fraudulent investment scheme paying investors from money paid in by other investors rather than real profits. It makes one wonder, just how and why it took so long for anyone to find out what this guy has done to bring him to justice? Did no one audit his books? Is it because there wasn’t enough regulation, or because the regulators were sleeping on their jobs? Similarly, I also need to ask of the risk management people of Bear Sterns, As for this Madoff guy… even sentencing him to death would have been letting him off too lightly. There’s only one death he deserved, and that is DEATH BY UMGAWAH |
But of course, no humans (nor animals) should be abused to perform the execution. I personally think the Japanese should specifically design a machine for this purpose but the Germans will manufacture it. On top of that, I would like the honor to throw the switch of this thing during the execution. |
Moment of the year:
Shoes thrown at George ‘Warmonger’ Bush during a press conference in Iraq.
Recommended Reads:
Nocturne: Defence of the Faith*
Nocturne: Indiscriminate Incrimination*
Cobalt Paladin: Diary of an Entrepreneur – Another “Duh” Moment
Warning: * denotes blog contains some graphical details which might be considered ‘Not Safe For Work’ [NSFW] and self-righteous moralists please refrain from clicking.
History Trivial:
講到慈禧之過，隨口算來包括導致甲午戰敗，撲滅戊戌變法，用義和團引來八國聯軍等等，似乎真有點罄竹難書；但若論其功，則重用漢臣，開辦洋務運動，奠立中國近代化工業基礎，造就同治中興氣象，以新式教育取代科舉，禁止婦女纏足等，倒也頗有可書之處。
而慈禧的家人除了襲「承恩公」的一個虛爵之外，並無他人能干涉朝政，在封建皇權時代，尤屬難得。