Given its agricultural origins, MF Global should have known better than to bet the farm. In the history of the crash, this bust brokerage deserves a special chapter because it illustrates the rake’s progress from prosperity to poverty.
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The first rule of cornering a market – cocoa beans or anything else – is not to take delivery. It means the speculator has to pay in full and then pay again to store the commodity in warehouses. And a soft commodity such as cocoa beans deteriorates.
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Fancy that: governments are poor at picking winners! Why then do they keep trying? Even now, a fund manager is being sought to invest another £150m of taxpayers’ money.
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Light-touch regulation is about to be axed but self-regulation still exists in one quarter of Canary Wharf. The Financial Services Authority has been allowed to identify its own deficiencies and remedy them. Again.
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A reality television show based on hedge funds looks as mis-timed as all those property programmes that are beyond their show-by dates. But is BBC2’s Million Dollar Traders intended to make us envy hedge dealers or hate them?
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