Challenge30: Enter The Rain Man

From my early days, I always wanted to be a Banker.
I was brought up in a time, when the only people you could implicitly trust,
was, either a Priest a Doctor or the local Banker.

These were the cornerstone of our society.
Top notch. A Number One. Top of the Heap.

I of course ended up a Coach Builder in Ireland's
Nationalized Bus and Train Company called C.I.E.

So the dream died. And just as well it seems.

So where did it all go wrong.
Was it the day the Priests and the Christian Brother Monks, started getting locked up, for messing with the kids, they where suppose to be protecting.

Or was it when the Bankers stopped watching Jimmy Stewart in, "It's a Wonderful life."
Does he not explain in great detail to the people of Bedford Falls. Just what a Bank is for?

I've watched this Movie lots of times and I have to confess his parallel timeline town, looks a lot more fun than the real town.
But it showed the inner goodness of man.
Jimmy Stewart was, "The Good Banker."
Then it all somehow, turned to shite.

Now we can't even find Father Chuck O'Malley, because he's either locked up in Jail or hiding in the Vatican claiming Political Asylum.

God they were all so fucking naive back then.

I've also been watching:
HyperNormalisation a film by Adam Curtis:
"How we got to this strange time of great uncertainty and confusion where those who are supposed to be in power are paralysed and have no idea what to do".

"Vote for me, Because I have no fucking idea as to what to do."
Is a modern day Politicians slogan in a nutshell.
Welcome to Trump World!

No great scandal about Doctors just yet.
But give them time.

But back to our trusted friend, "The Banker."

OH! what a fucking mess they have gotten us into.

I mean rigging the Libor. Come on!
I never even knew what a Libor was until this happened;D(

Read On:

Libor scandal: the bankers who fixed the world’s most important number

At the Tokyo headquarters of the Swiss bank UBS, in the middle of a deserted trading floor, Tom Hayes sat rapt before a bank of eight computer screens. Collar askew, pale features pinched, blond hair mussed from a habit of pulling at it when he was deep in thought, the British trader was even more disheveled than usual. It was 15 September 2008, and it looked, in Hayes’s mind, like the end of the world.

Hayes had been woken up at dawn in his apartment by a call from his boss, telling him to get to the office immediately. In New York, Lehman Brothers was hurtling towards bankruptcy. At his desk, Hayes watched the world processing the news and panicking. As each market opened, it became a sea of flashing red as investors frantically dumped their holdings. In moments like this, Hayes entered an almost unconscious state, rapidly processing the tide of information before him and calculating the best escape route.

Hayes was a phenomenon at UBS, one of the best the bank had at trading derivatives. So far, the mounting financial crisis had actually been good for him. The chaos had let him buy cheaply from those desperate to get out, and sell high to the unlucky few who still needed to trade. While most dealers closed up shop in fear, Hayes, with a seemingly limitless appetite for risk, stayed in. He was 28, and he was up more than $70 million for the year.

Now that was under threat. Not only did Hayes have to extract himself from every deal he had done with Lehman, he had also made a series of enormous bets that in the coming days interest rates would remain stable. The collapse of Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest investment bank in the US, would surely cause those rates, which were really just barometers of risk, to spike. As Hayes examined his trading book, one rate mattered more than any other: the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, a benchmark that influences $350 trillion of securities and loans around the world. For traders such as Hayes, this number was the Holy Grail. And two years earlier, he had discovered a way to rig it.

Libor was set by a self-selected, self-policing committee of the world’s largest banks. The rate measured how much it cost them to borrow from each other. Every morning, each bank submitted an estimate, an average was taken, and a number was published at midday. The process was repeated in different currencies, and for various amounts of time, ranging from overnight to a year. During his time as a junior trader in London, Hayes had got to know several of the 16 individuals responsible for making their bank’s daily submission for the Japanese yen.

His flash of insight was realizing that these men mostly relied on inter-dealer brokers, the fast-talking middlemen involved in every trade, for guidance on what to submit each day.

Brokers are the middlemen in the world of finance, facilitating deals between traders at different banks in everything from Treasury bonds to over-the-counter derivatives. If a trader wants to buy or sell, he could theoretically ring all the banks to get a price. Or he could go through a broker who is in touch with everyone and can find a counter-party in seconds. Hardly a dollar changes hands in the cash and derivatives markets without a broker matching the deal and taking his cut.
In the opaque, over-the-counter derivatives market, where there is no centralised exchange, brokers are at the epicentre of information flow. That puts them in a powerful position. Only they can get a picture of what all the banks are doing. While brokers had no official role in setting Libor, the rate-setters at the banks relied on them for information on where cash was trading.
Because of Hayes’s intimacy with numbers, his co-workers reminded him he was not like them. They called him Rain Man.

Read the Whole Article:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jan/18/libor-scandal-the-bankers-who-fixed-the-worlds-most-important-number

Images from Pixabay

Challenge 30 is a 30 day writing challenge issued by @dragosroua to write and post every day in January.

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