Cartoon Of The Day

European Crisis, Explained

How To Lose $2.3bn

By now, you'll have heard all about Kweku Adoboli, the City trader charged with hiding $2.3bn (£1.46bn) of losses from his bank. You'll have seen the moody black and white photos he posted on Facebook, along with those made-for-tabloid confessional updates such as "Need a miracle". And you'll have read how UBS managers didn't have a clue about the 31-year-old's rogue trading right up until last week.

In the olden, golden days, the most effective way of taking loads of money off a bank was to rob it. Nowadays, if you really want to hit a bank where it hurts, you go and work for it. The Brinks-MAT heist of the early 80s was worth £68m in today's money. The robbery of the Northern Bank headquarters in Belfast in Christmas 2004 netted the equivalent of £31m. Not bad for a day's work, but pocket shrapnel compared with the £4.3bn that Jérôme Kerviel's rogue trading cost Société Générale in 2008, or the £1.2bn of damage (roughly adjusted for inflation) that Nick Leeson did to Barings in the 90s. Besides, rogue trading is a much lower-impact activity than bank robbery, requiring neither balaclavas nor a cosh, but merely some smart slacks and a plausible manner.

The downsides are obvious: get caught and you'll probably get banged up, and never again be allowed within 10 feet of a cash register. On the other hand, your life might become the subject of a film, preferably starring Ewan McGregor trying out his gassy-lager cockney.

Those, briskly rattled off, are the caveats. So, on the strict understanding that you are not actually going to do anything illegal or even vaguely naughty with this information, let me present a five-point guide to rogue trading – or how to lose $2.3bn without your bosses noticing.

First, understand that you don't need to be especially roguish to be a rogue trader. Anyone can do it. Senior bankers don't want to let on, of course, which is why the then-chief executive of France's giant SocGen referred to Kerviel as both an "evil genius" and a "financial terrorist". He was nothing of the sort – just a lowly employee who made a series of big and wrong bets and then covered them up by forging trades, faking emails and making up clients.

Second, come from the wrong background. Stars in a blue-chip finance firm such as SocGen often come with either the right postgraduate degree from the right university – they land in the right departments and stay there, landing the best promotions. They know one patch of one part of their banks – and are blank about the rest, which makes them useless white-collar criminals.

Yet neither Kerviel nor Leeson started out as traders – but in admin positions that taught them how their banks' compliance and other systems worked. It was that knowledge that enabled the two men to go rogue.

Third, read Codes of Finance by Vincent Lepinay. The first in-depth anthropological study of how banks invent new financial products (such as the newfangled derivatives that helped cause the credit crisis), it's really aimed at academics. But would-be rogue traders will find this new book invaluable, as it lays out all the chinks in the modern investment bank. Lepinay spent nearly two years in a huge French bank that he refers to as General Bank, and his study is both highly revealing and slightly farcical.

The press often talks about investment bankers as if they are all one tribe; but as the MIT researcher describes it, there are instead lots of different factions – who have a hard time even understanding each other. The creators of these new derivatives often have top MBAs and look down upon the quant nerds, who deal with prices and have physics degrees. The quants feel superior to the traders, who rely upon them like a tour party relies on its translator. And then there are the salespeople – who just want to flog the things, be they CDOs, CLOs or just plain CRAP. Then there are the risk controllers, who approach the banks' stars with rightful trepidation, and the senior management, who only pop in once a week. What this means for a would-be rogue trader is that there are more gaps in an investment bank's organisation than in the dentistry of the Wife of Bath.

Fourth, work on the most newfangled products, because hardly anyone else will understand what you're up to. Adoboli (who, let me stress, has yet to enter a plea) was in exchange traded funds – which used to look like unit trusts, but have got increasingly complicated. One of the top market regulators, Mario Draghi, recently described ETFs as "reminiscent of what happened in the securitisation market before the crisis". Read that quote again: he's comparing them to sub-prime mortgages. Most of us should get very worried; rogue traders should go steaming in.

Finally, applaud the calls to separate investment wizardy from high-street banking. In finance, the fashionable thing to say is that the UBS scandal proves the Vickers Commission right to call for a ringfence. True, it might protect taxpayers from banking losses, but rogue trading is a product of dysfunctional institutions and the finance sector's love of innovation as a way of skimming off more profits. To have a chance of stopping it, we'll need to make all finance a lot simpler.

Cartoon Of The Day

Obama's 50

Barack Obama is 50 – yay! And what better birthday present than 50 reasons for him to be cheerful in an otherwise trying week? Double yay!

1 It's his birthday! There, a nice easy one to get the ball rolling.

2 He has 9,433,000 Twitter followers and that's loads!

3 And that means lots of happy-birthday Tweets, which is nice.

4 Sarah Palin has only 620,000! Pathetic!

5 If anyone picks on him because of his ears, he can have that person killed.

6 Likewise, if they beat him at Pass the Parcel.

7 It is the only day of the year he can plausibly enjoy a tea party.

8 His poor fundraising quarter means he can ask party guests to bring a bottle.

9 He can reasonably assume that the next year can't possibly be as financially disastrous as the one just gone.

10 They are never going to make him pay back the whole $14 trillion.

11 And if they do, he can just call one of those debt consolidation firms they advertise during Deal or No Deal.

12 Or just move and not leave a forwarding address.

13 He shares his birthday with Ian Broudie and Lee Mack.

14 He is not that man in New Zealand who just decapitated himself demonstrating a home-made hovercraft to his family.

15 Nor is he a British magician who may or may not have been hospitalised by a pizza.

16 Prezzies!

17 50 is the new 40.

18 The Smurfs movie is out next week!

19 David Cameron can phone him any time he likes.

20 Nick Clegg probably can too.

21 Whereas Tony Blair can't.

22 He can create a "birthday buddies" group on Google+.

23 He can reasonably assume, with all that's going on, that News Corp is not hacking his phone.

24 He can get drunk today and not think about that really nasty Tropical Storm Emily that is about to trash Florida.

25 He gets to watch Piers Morgan every night.

26 "Barack Obama is a horrible 50-year-old twat" gets no Google hits.

27 And brilliantly, remove the quote marks and the first thing you get is Russell Brand's Wikipedia page.

28 The US constitution states that, on his birthday, the president gets dominion of all the beasts of the land and the sea.

29 That last one might not actually be true.

30 He gets to impress people by telling them that he is "a quintagenarian".

31 Although being president of the United States should really be enough.

32 I mean, he can basically have any sandwich he wants, all the time! Awesome!

33 And presumably that extends to birthday cakes too.

34 The Premier League season is about to start.

35 And if soccer isn't his bag, the US has just started its first "lingerie basketball" league. Seriously.

36 He has a very attractive wife. What? We're just saying!

37 He's on Vanity Fair's Most Stylish Men 2011 list, released yesterday.

38 It's really nice out.

39 Apart from in a few of those southern states that are flooded.

40 But they didn't vote for him anyway.

41 A toilet built to celebrate his inauguration just got nominated for the 2011 Best Restroom award.

42 That house he lives in in America is so nice.

43 And that bullet-proof limousine is bare safe.

44 He looks, like, 44 at the oldest.

45 The White House's nearest branch of Papa John's has an offer of two double-topping pizzas for $22.

46 And all things considered, a little thrift wouldn't go amiss.

47 Oh. It's collection only. Wait! He can send an aide, it's what they're there for!

48 If his age were a cricket score, at this point he could remove his helmet and acknowledge the crowd's applause for the first time.

49 That new Jay-Z and Kanye album is sick.

50 G2 has done this birthday tribute to him.

Big Corp Power?

Womens, Foots, Gooses

Speakers' Corner

My sister and her husband are visiting. We're in Hyde Park, walking along the Serpentine. I've forced the youngest one to come along, and he is anxious to resume his television-viewing schedule.

"We should cross just here," he says, pointing to a bridge.

"There's a way across up there," I say, pointing straight ahead.

"But the car's that way," he says.

"We're not going to the car," I say.

My brother-in-law, who is Bulgarian, has expressed a desire to see Speakers' Corner. The youngest one does not take the news well.

"What?" he shouts, adopting the posture of a puppet hanging dejectedly from its strings. Even after I buy him an ice-cream, he continues to make his feelings plain, kicking a football ahead of him as we walk.

"You might actually find it interesting," I say.

"Why would I?" he says. "Just a bunch of hippies arguing."

"You don't know what a hippy is."

"You're lucky," my brother-in-law says. "I grew up under communism. We never had something like this."

Anyone looking to find democracy in action at Speakers' Corner is liable to be disappointed. It's now more of a showcase for religious quackery. A man in a cowboy hat with Jesus Is Alive embroidered on his trousers stands on a stepladder, berating a Muslim in the crowd while being incoherently heckled by three large young men, one shirtless, all mashed. The boy hands me his football.

"Hold this," he says. "I need to deal with this guy." He snakes to the front of the crowd and raises his hand. The cowboy tells his audience they're going to hell. Ten minutes pass. I try to catch the boy's eye, but he ignores me. My sister comes over.

"What's going on?" she says.

"Dunno," I say. "He appears to have a question."

One of the mashed young men picks up the boy and puts him on his shoulders, swaying alarmingly. His hand remains in the air. Eventually, I manage to snatch him down.

"Let's move on," I say.

"He totally ignored me," says the boy. "He saw my hand."

We stroll from speaker to speaker, but religion seems to be the only topic on offer. At some point I notice the youngest one is no longer with us.

"Did you see where he went?" I say. Behind me, I can hear the cowboy bellowing, hoarse with mock outrage. "How old are you? You're 12?"

"Uh-oh," I say.

By the time I get there, the crowd has formed a circle around them. Only the cowboy's voice is audible above the clamour: "Do you believe in evolution?" he shouts. "You do?"

Tourists are photographing the standoff. "Listen to him!" one yells.

"If you believe in evolution, what was here before the universe? Nothing? You believe in nothing?"

An onlooker raises the issue of the fossil record, and I manage to get the youngest out of the crowd before a band of three hovering evangelicals can convert him. He stalks across the park, eyes shining with fury.

"And you didn't want to come," I say.

"I shouldn't have told him my age," he says. "After that, he just dismissed everything I said."

"You can't win an argument with someone like that. He has a ladder."

"Everyone was on your side," says my brother-in-law. "You're my hero."

Later, watching the event on my sister's phone, I hear the boy's response to the argument that, because he believes in evolution, he believes in nothing. He pinches the bridge of his nose with two fingers and shakes his head. "Oh my God," he says. "You're being such an idiot."

by Tim Dowling

(to my son)

Top Top Top Players

It seems significant that the dominant emotion of the current summer transfer window is not excitement or ambition, but a kind of generalised, grasping confusion. Mainly, nobody has any real idea about value. English premiums, contract lengths, degrees of risk and reward are all suddenly avenues of fevered debate. It is a peculiarly exciting mess – and one that is developing its own language. This week Harry Redknapp described Luka Modric, who looks increasingly haunted and unhappy, like a frightened cat being forced into a basket, as not just a good player but "a top, top player".

Redknapp isn't alone in identifying this quality. Charlie Adam has talked about the "top, top players" at Liverpool and how he's looking forward to "learning from them", albeit this is the sort of thing you would expect Adam to say given his endearing resemblance to a Dickensian man-child rogue, perhaps a thieving tinker or a chimney sweep who is taught to read by a six-year-old girl and discovers the true meaning of Christmas. Top top players. Top top top top players. This is apparently the way we're going to talk about footballers now. But whose fault is it?

It is tempting to point to a wider overheating, a compounding of absolutes everywhere. It is a top top top top world and football is simply reflecting this. On the other hand it may be easier just to blame Jamie Redknapp. Redknapp popularised the concept of top top through his punditry on Sky Sports, often concluding his entertaining digressions with the phrase "We're talking about top top players, Ruud – top top top players". No doubt this has had a profound influence. Like the kind of people who shout "Murderer!" and "Give Denise's baby back!" in the street at off-duty soap actors, there are those who have perhaps become confused by Redknapp's TV persona and genuinely consider him to be a footballing oracle, the voice of what Pelé once called "the top top game".

It is above all a crisis of diminishing superlatives. The concept of top top sprung out of a superheated Sky-driven Premier League where everything is great pretty much all the time. How do you express excitement or even mild approval in a world where the emotional barometer is continually pitched at a level of damp-eyed superbity?

In theory, this is an open-ended scale. Redknapp might remark in passing: "You look at Wayne Rooney, Ryan Giggs – these are top top players."

"Yes, Jamie," you'd say. "But you look at Xavi, Iniesta – these are top top top players."

"Lionel Messi, Nandor Hidegkuti, Garrincha, Hot Shot Hamish, the Honourable Alfred Lyttelton – you're talking top top top top top players," Jamie would insist, becoming agitated.

And so it is that fresh mezzanine levels of topness just keep opening up, secret doors, priest holes, tower rooms, private elevators, Jamie ushering you ever upwards though VIP suites of vertiginous approval and into a realm of pure top top top top top. In fact, the issue of footballing classification pre‑dates even the Redknapp Index. The more you look at it, the more confusing it becomes – and so in the current age of rolling analysis the old problem of working out who is and isn't any good at football has become a barking chorus of blanket bafflement. This isn't cricket, where a player's worth can be measured out by an exacting formula. Football is free-form. It is one giant amorphous opinion. Even with things like statistics and goalscoring records and medals with things like "player of the year" inscribed on them, still the debate rages.

No one is safe. Frank Lampard is too fat. John Terry is too slow. Rio Ferdinand is too easily distracted by bright lights, magazines, shoes, gurgling banter-attacks. Steven Gerrard is simply a pair of wild, flailing legs. Stewart Downing is wreathed in a peculiar air of sadness. Peter Crouch is a brilliant satirical spoof of English traditional "strengths". Messi is a cheat, obsessed with temperate weather. Weirdly, the only exception, the only unclouded absolute, is Paul Scholes: if you say he's rubbish you get stabbed in the eye by the Queen.

This instability extends across management, officialdom and punditry. Sir Alex Ferguson makes referees give Manchester United trophies. Arsène Wenger is mad and a proven loser. Fabio Capello is evil. Stuart Pearce hates old people and dogs. Roy Hodgson tortures mice in his kitchen. Sam Allardyce regularly shoplifts penny sweets then just throws them out of his car window on the motorway.

I think Jamie Redknapp is great but there are those who see only a thigh-chafing collage of unrelated think-blurts. Is Graeme Souness really any good, or is he just grimacingly soulful and authentic, like a man in an uplifting advert for boiler repair care plans? Is Alan Hansen wonderfully laconic or does he just never say anything with any content, instead lolling immovably on his sofa cushions, trussed within his satin man-shirt and unspooling his soothing gobbets of TV-Scottish?

Nobody really knows. Nobody really knows anything. Glazed by superlatives, wildly overpriced and buffeted by conflicting tribal denouncements, this is now football's default setting: a gloriously irresolvable confusion of absolutes, and a condition that spreads right through from bottom to top to top top top top.

by Barney Ronay

Old School Google

Apocalypse Now!... Maybe

Good news for Rapture lovers! The world is going to end after all – only it's going to take a little longer than predicted.

Harold Camping, architect of Saturday's dramatic events in which Judgment Day came and went without so much as an earthquake, has revealed what went wrong. He took to his show on his network Family Radio to reveal the simple truth: the Apocalypse was imminent, he'd just been out by five months. So now the world is going to end– really and truly this time – on 21 October.

Camping was disarmingly honest about the impact the world's inconvenient continuance was having on him, after he predicted 200 million Christians would rise to heaven by 6pm on Saturday followed by the destruction of the Earth in a massive fireball.

"I can tell you when 21 May came and went it was a very difficult time for me – a very difficult time. I was truly wondering what is going on. In my mind, I went back through all the promises God had made. What in the world was happening. I really was praying and praying: 'Lord, what happened?'"

Many of Camping's followers might be asking similar questions, particularly those who gave up their jobs or donated some of the $100m (£61m) believed to have been spent on billboards and RV trucks advertising the arrival of doomsday. But then, there's no consumer protection legislation when it comes to Armageddon.

Among the disappointed, though still living, Rapture groupies were Robert Fitzpatrick, who spent all his life savings of $140,000 spreading the word of the world's end, and Jeff Hopkins, who erected a doomsday sign on top of his car and has spent the past few months driving from Long Island to New York city to publicise it.

"I've been mocked and scoffed and cursed at and I've been through a lot with this lighted sign on top of my car," he told Associated Press. "I was doing what I've been instructed to do through the Bible, but now I've been stymied. It's like getting slapped in the face."

Camping, who predicted the Apocalypse would come in 1994, appears to be impervious to the kind of knocks that would floor a lesser man. He spent Saturday night cowering in a motel to avoid the media onslaught, but has recovered his composure soon enough.

Tune in to his radio show, Open Forum, on 22 October to find out whether he can bounce back yet again. Assuming, that is, the world hasn't ended by then.

Happy Day...

Cartoon Of The Day

OBL - The Diaries

14 August 2009

Watched TV for a few hours to see if there were any stories about me. Nothing today. I did see that temptress Sarah Palin on CNN though, practically naked as usual – wrists showing, ankles, hair, everything. Oddly enough, she was talking about death panels. I have always advocated them as a quick and efficient way to punish people for stealing fruit or shaving, but she seemed very dismissive of the idea. At one point she actually said "Obama's death panels" instead of "Osama's death panels", but the interviewer didn't pick her up on the mistake. Stupid woman.

11 September 2009

Fired into the air a few times, but everybody said it was a bad idea. "Too much noise, Osama. You'll draw attention to our hiding place." Cowards, all of them. Not really in a holiday mood, anyway. Nobody celebrates it round here.

19 January 2010

Spent the morning planning new attacks on major American population centres. You have to keep yourself busy in a place like this, otherwise you'll go mad. We need to stage more mass killings – lots of small killings will do nothing to change US policy. They have small killings almost every day there – I doubt they would even notice. Also, I'm big on trains these days. And attacking on dates sacred to Americans: 4 July, Madonna's birthday, the Vanity Fair Oscar party, Lindsay Lohan court appearance, etc. To paraphrase those fat cooks from the BBC, it's time to take killing to the next level.

When I was finished I called everyone into the safe room to tell them my new plan to defeat the infidels: we are going to attack the public transport network of Los Angeles, bringing this modern-day Sodom to its knees. Someone laughed and said, "good luck with that". Then I said, "Jihad does NOT get tougher than this!" and we all laughed. It's good to feel at the centre of things again.

26 April 2010

Saw myself on TV, in an old clip from who knows when, exhorting followers to exterminate western imperialists. So young! What happened to that dashing, smoky-eyed, full-lipped fellow? He is sat here hunched in a shawl, eating seeds and watching Larry King. Sigh.

5 June 2010

Very hot. Spent afternoon in the courtyard, reading and thinking. It is lonely here, but also very peaceful. At times like these, war and death and western imperialism seem a world away from this little seat under the olive tree. If next door's ball comes over that wall one more time today I'm going to put a bullet in it before I throw it back.

15 August 2010

Courier came today: secret messages from al-Qaida, more AA batteries for the remote, copy of Newsweek, Ikea catalogue (they send me two, every time, even though I have never ordered anything) and a pirate DVD of Finding Nemo. Watched it, laughed a lot, condemned it afterwards.

Tonight is book-club night, and everyone in the compound is angry with me because I have picked the Qur'an again. They all say they have read it before. I say, but have you memorised it? They say, you always hijack the discussion! This is true, I suppose. Abu says it is his turn to pick. No way, I tell him. Never again, not after Angela's Ashes.

3 November 2010

Can't tell whether to be pleased by US election results. Their system is so complicated! Two houses of legislature, president, cabinet, judiciary – as far as I'm concerned it all adds up to one great big Satan. I guess the Republican win is bad for healthcare reform, and therefore good (more Americans dead, no extra work for us) but I'm finding it hard to feel pleased.

22 November 2010

Very tired today. Stayed up late last night with friends arguing about whether or not dishwashers were blasphemous. And you can't just say "yes" and be done with it. Everyone wants reasons. In the end I told them that, God willing, we should concentrate our efforts on eliminating bigger evils – America, Israel, music – and leave smaller doctrinal questions about household appliances to one side for now. Hassan says some of the new ones use less water than the old, non-blasphemous way of washing-up, but of course this is not the point.

Later, probably because I was tired, I had an accident with the beard dye. First, I used the Delicate Iced Chocolate instead of the Sensual Black, then I forgot to put on the gloves, then I left the stuff on way too long. I cannot make a video looking like this. It will have to wait.

8 March 2011

OMG WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ARSENAL!!! 3-1 WHAT ARE THEY LIKE!!!!

30 April 2011

Something weird going on in the neighbourhood. Can't put my finger on it, but there are some extra antennas on the roof over the road, and that white van on the corner has been there for, like, four days. I got so worried I called ISI, but they said I was just being paranoid.

by Tim Dowling

Brilliant or Ooops?

Letter Of The Day

A senior American official has suggested Colonel Gaddafi flees to a country that does not recognise the international criminal court (Report, 29 March). That would include America. Tripoli, Iowa, would seem an appropriate refuge.

Roger Wild

Teddington, Middlesex

Map Of The Day

Capitalism - A Poster

WTF (Serious)

The CIA has launched a taskforce to assess the impact of 250,000 leaked US diplomatic cables. Its name? WikiLeaks Task Force, or WTF for short.

The group will scour the released documents to survey damage caused by the disclosures. One of the most embarrassing revelations was that the US state department had drawn up a list of information it would like on key UN figures – it later emerged the CIA had asked for the information.

"Officially, the panel is called the WikiLeaks Task Force. But at CIA headquarters, it's mainly known by its all-too-apt acronym: WTF," the Washington Post reported.

WTF is more commonly associated with the Facebook and Twitter profiles of teenagers than secret agency committees. Given that its expanded version is usually an expression of extreme disbelief, perhaps the term is apt for the CIA's investigation.

Earlier this month the Guardian revealed that the CIA was responsible for drafting the data "wishlist" that the US state department wanted on UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, and other senior members of the organisation. The Washington Post said the panel was being led by the CIA's counterintelligence centre, although it has drawn in two dozen members from departments across the agency.

Although the CIA has featured in some WikiLeaks disclosures, relatively little of its own information has entered the ether, the paper reported. A recently retired former high-ranking CIA official told the Post this was because the agency "has not capitulated to this business of making everything available to outsiders.

"They don't even make everything available to insiders. And by and large the system has worked," he said.

While most of the agency's correspondence is understood to be classified at the same "secret" level as the leaked cables that ended up online, it is understood the CIA uses systems different from those of other government agencies.

Acronyms sometimes suck

Acronyms. Pithy and useful when you get them right, embarrassing and memorable when you fail to spot the pun.

Long before the internet revived the TLA (three-letter acronym), there was MAD, one of the more appropriate constructions, which stood for mutually assured destruction, the doctrine under which everyone dies if nuclear devices were deployed.

Change one letter, and you get BAD, or British Association of Dermatologists – as in: "I'd love a BAD practitioner to look at my skin."

Unfortunately the spoilsports at BAD usually put "the" before the acronym on the association's website, although there are a couple of slips: "To find out how to write BAD clinical guidelines, please click here," being one of them.

Many other good examples are given on the Unfortunate Acronyms website, also known as ASS – Acronyms Sometimes Suck.

Another in the field of medicine is DOH, the website of the Washington state department of health (www.doh.wa.gov). Hardly encouraging for those planning a visit, given its connotations with the general incompetence personified by Homer in the Simpsons.

The Boston Redevelopment Authority doesn't shy away from using its abbreviated form.

Almost unbelievably, there is a Breakthrough Urban Ministries operating two homeless shelters in Chicago. Unsurprisingly, the organisation does not use its acronym when promoting its services, preferring to shorten the name to Breakthrough.

The Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme is often described as one of the last attempts at colonisation by the British empire.

The plan was to reduce overpopulation on the Gilbert islands in the South Pacific by moving numbers of people to the neighbouring Phoenix islands.

The outbreak of the second world war hampered the move, and only one of the eight islands is now believed to be inhabited – and the islands are threatened by rising sea levels.

Gap Yeah 2: Afterparty