Glencore in the DRC: Building a case for shareholder activism

Over the last year I've become somewhat intrigued by Glencore and other physical commodity traders. Part of that interest comes from my work on commodity speculation, and the fact that much of the analysis around that issue has focused on investment banks and hedge funds rather than the companies that actually deal in physical commodities. Part comes from my fascination with figuring out how the global trade system works. Glencore has the added draw of being a notoriously opaque and secretive company, with a controversial and swashbuckling ex-captain who made a name for himself by doing deals that no-one else would do. Trying to figure out how their vast commodity operations work is a detective mystery if ever there was one.

In May 2011 they went public and listed on the London Stock Exchange. That means they sold ownership stakes to investors via the UK market. Technically speaking though, they only sold about 12% of the company, and technically speaking, they're not based in the UK. Rather, Glencore is based in the Canton of Zug in Switzerland, which is, to use the words of the Canton's publicity team, renowned for 'its business-friendly mentality'... which is to say... um... low taxes. For tasks other than tax accounting, Glencore has other cosy offices, like the one in London, on Berkeley Street, next door to the Sainsbury’s that I used to buy salads at back in 2010.

Stirring the copper kettle

Anyway, last week I published an article about Glencore in The Ecologist, after spending some time digging into some of their operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The editor put in a byline which kind of sums it up: "Moves by unknown shell companies to control lucrative natural resources may have cost Democratic Republic of Congo $1 billion in lost revenue, as UK-listed mining company Glencore under pressure to explain deals"

Sounds pretty interesting right? If you want more detail, take a look at the article, but basically it concerns two mines in Katanga Province - Mutanda and Kansuki - that Glencore co-owns and operates. Back in early 2011, their business partner in the deals - the Congolese state-owned mining company Gecamines - sold off its stakes to two shell companies listed in the British Virgin Islands, associated with a controversial diamond dealer called Dan Gertler, allegedly at a big discount. This is by no means a new story - it first emerged back in July 2011 - but it’s a story that’s been seriously underreported and one that remains unresolved. In September IMF expressed concern, and a UK MP called Eric Joyce continues to try raise awareness about these, and other deals in the DRC copper-belt (see map below).

CHECK OUT THIS AMAZING KATANGA COPPER MAP ON GOOGLE

I wanted to write about the Mutanda / Kansuki issue to help keep it in the public eye. I also noticed that most reports to date have focused on the DRC companies involved. I wanted to ask another question: How much does Glencore know about what went on?

So I did ask that, but when I phoned Glencore, it appeared they didn't think much of my query. I got to chat to Glencore's main media spokesman, a pleasant guy called Simon Buerk (who incidentally used to work as the spokesman for Shell, so I guess he’s pretty well practised with inquisitive journalists asking probing questions). Simon was actually very open and took substantial time to chat to me whilst driving on a Swiss highway. His message, as quoted in the Ecologist article, was simple: Glencore is aware of the accusations against Gecamines, but these deals involve parties external to Glencore and therefore it is irrellevant to ask their opinion on it.

It’s a line which I find difficult to accept fully. It’s true that Glencore is not legally responsible for the actions of its business associates, but can we not argue that they have a moral duty of care to their shareholders to make sure every deal they’re involved in has very robust overall governance? If nothing else, the highly non-transparent manner in which the deals took place should immediately raise concerns among the public, and shareholders, especially when it concerns the DRC, a country notorious for poor institutions. Can Glencore assure it's shareholders that they're associated with business partners that uphold robust governance standards?

Taking ownership

Then again, most of Glencore's shares are held by the company management, and a handful of institutional investors (which include Abu Dhabi based Aabar Investments, the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore, and BlackRock). Whilst the institutional investors could be encouraged to ask questions, it's difficult to get such organisations to do so. On the other hand, if I buy some Glencore shares, I become a part-owner of the company, with a theoretical right to raise my concerns with the management, who I would technically-speaking employ (see my earlier post about my experiences doing this with Centrica).

So, last Saturday I attended the FairPensions Shareholder Activism training day held at Amnesty UK's Shoreditch offices. It was attended by a whole range of people from civil society organisations, looking to use the power of owning shares to push forward progressive causes, whether it be countering tar sands in Canada, questioning arctic oil drilling, or combating tax avoidance. For my part, I took the opportunity to workshop some potential questions to ask Glencore management at their annual general meeting.

An interesting question to ask the executives would be something like this: "Recently UK MP Eric Joyce and the IMF raised serious concerns about the sale of stakes in mines you co-own in the DRC. Joyce, and others, claim that your initial partner in the mines secretly sold their stakes to shell companies associated with a person closely connected to the DRC president Joseph Kabila, and did so at hugely discounted prices. This raises the issue of what due dilligence processes you have in place when entering into joint ventures with partners in countries known for high levels of political risk. My questions to you are 1) Are you aware of these allegations related to your business associates, and 2) What procedures do you have in place to assure shareholders that the company will not be exposed to potential future damages arising from reputational risk and politically-imposed penalties and fines?"

I'd probably need to get the question more precise and I suspect the answer would be pretty generic, but that’s not the point. Glencore undoubtedly has a strong response, but the fact of the matter is that nobody has yet challenged them, and if there is one thing that I believe as a general principle, it’s that it’s always preferable to challenge power than to not challenge it.

Hey guys, can I call you StrataCore?

That's going to be all the more important now that Glencore has announced a probable merger with XStrata, which would create a commodity behemoth unlike any we've seen before (The press are calling them Glencore Xstrata, but I bet they'll call themselves StrataCore). Glencore specialises in commodity trading, and XStrata specialises in physical mining, and whatever the combined entity gets called, both companies think that there is great potential for 'synergies'. In particular, there will be increased potential for ‘geographical arbitrage’, which is a fancy way of saying the company will have superlative ability to source low price commodities whilst selling them in places where the prices are much higher. It plays into the hands of Glencore's core business model, which revolves around its ability to make money off global commodity market inefficiency (Indeed, the original way Glencore founder Marc Rich did this was by doing deals in places where commodity prices were depressed by political isolation or turmoil, a skill that requires aggression and significant exposure to gatekeepers who are politically exposed).

XSTRATA 'HEADQUARTERS' in ZUG - YEAH RIGHT

If nothing else, Glencore and XStrata will have synergies in the Canton of Zug, where both companies are 'based'. The combined entity will be able to share a mailbox, and a tab at the local pub.

The Safe Deposit Box: Creating a Financial Wikileaks

If you were a bank employee with information about wrongdoing in your division, would you be happy to approach your senior management about it? The Whistleblower Improvement Act of 2011 would require just that, making financial whistleblowers report their concerns to company management rather than approaching government agencies directly. The act has been backed by Rep. Michael Grimm, a former FBI agent who spent a couple years undercover trying to bust dodgy stock brokerages for securities fraud. You’d think that experience would make him attuned to the problems of financial crime, but Michael Smallberg of POGO argues that “Rep. Grimm’s legislation would hobble SEC and CFTC enforcement, chill the flow of high-quality insider tips, imperil the safety and livelihood of whistleblowers, and give law-breaking companies an accountability escape hatch”.

WHO'S SCARIER? Your workmates, or Rep. Grimm?

I don't know enough about the proposed legislation to hold any definite views, but in any case GovTrackreckons that there’s only a 2% chance of the bill being passed. The greatest barriers to whistleblowing though, are social, not legal. It’s the threat of being shunned by colleagues, or passed over for promotion. Occasionally an employee just doesn't care about the social fallout, as in the case of Greg Smith’s public letter about Goldman Sachs, but more often than not they do. A life built around workplace social networks can act as a shield against speaking out against it. Potential whistleblowers doubt themselves, or don’t want to be seen as the one to spoil the party (Check out Joris Luyendijk's interview with a whistleblower). Legal support mechanisms do exist for whistleblowers, there’s little in the way of internal cultural support.

The Case for a Financial Wikileaks

That's why I reckon it's very important to have leak sites. They protect employees (to some extent) from senior management retribution, but also provide a way to bypass the social barriers to speaking out. Financial whistleblowers can currently make use of various leak sites (check out the Leak site directory), and regulatory agencies such as the FSAand the Serious Fraud Office do provide mechanisms for them. Wikileaks has previously been used for financial leaks regarding Julius Baer and Barclays, and in 2011 there was speculation that they were going to release a bombshell on Bank of America, based on emails obtained by Anonymous (In the end the emails ended up on bankofamericasuck.com and here, apparently showing dodgy dealings at a BoA subsidiary called Balboa, obtained via a leaker who claimed the bank was trying to cover it up).

DON'T MIND US, WE'RE JUST OBSERVING

Wikileaks though, has mostly made a name for itself in exposing political controversy. People don’t predominantly think of it as the place to go for corporate wrongdoing, and corporate disclosures on the site run the risk of being drowned out by the drone of government abuse. A group that does specialise in corporate disclosure is Anonymous Analytics, a wing of Anonymous specialising in "Acquiring information through unconventional means" (AKA hacking and subterfuge), and presenting it in the form of faux financial research reports. They made a stir last year for exposing potential fraud at Chaoda Modern Agriculture, a Hong Kong company that AnonAnalytics claimed was “overstating its cash balance, exaggerating its revenue, and falsifying its financial statements.” Last week they 'initiated coverage' on Huaboa International, calling it a 'pump and dump scheme with the primary objective of enriching its chairwoman'. AnonAnalystics specialises in 'primary research', but for a while it offered a dropbox facility for would-be whistleblowers. They recently shut that down, apparently because they were unable to deal with the volume of tips, comments and emails they received. Sounds like they need some more staff.

It's not just about crime
Organisations like AnonAnalytics are focused on overt cases of corporate fraud and headline grabbing controversies. Nevertheless, while having channels to expose criminality is important, there are many other equally valid reasons to create a leak site. Wikileaks release of the diplomatic cables, for example, didn't really reveal anything that controversial, but were fascinating because they offered a rare window into the internal culture of diplomatic life, the petty squabbles and power dynamics. It provided huge amounts of material for academic researchers and journalists to gain a better understanding of an otherwise opaque and closed area. There are very few such windows into the financial sector, and to date people have relied on various works of literary pop finance (e.g.Liar's Poker), and once off curiosities such as the Goldman Sachs Elevator Gossip twitter account to get mini-leaks about financial culture.

The Safe Deposit Box: A Tool for Transparency

JP MORGAN: DOWNLOAD INTERNAL STRUCTURE

It seems that there may be a case for a specialised financial leak site. Here's my back-of-the-envelope sketch for the Safe Deposit Box, a site focused on improving transparency in financial institutions (e.g. banks, funds) and commodity trading outfits, by providing a channel to encourage internal leaks. It could be curated by individuals with financial expertise, such that information leaked could be vetted for accuracy and presented correctly (something that non-specialist leak sites might not be able to do effectively). The site could be split into two divisions with different purposes:

1. A whistleblowing section to allow financial employees to expose dubious behaviour, such as instances of financial crime, market manipulation, insider trading, and rogue trading.
2. A transparency initiative focused on shedding light on the inner workings of financial institutions. This section would encourage employees to contribute information such as organisational structures, divisional strategies, risk exposures, compensation, and other info that helps to break the near impenetrable wall of secrecy large financial institutions frequently enjoy.

Many people intuitively understand the value of division 1, but division 2 is more tricky to justify. What's the point of transparency for transparency's sake? I would argue that banks and other financial institutions have huge political clout, and yet most citizens have almost no insight into their workings and strategies. For example, do most residents of Chicago have any idea of how a Morgan Stanley consortium came to be owning the city's parking metres? At a larger systemic scale too, it’s the very opacity of financial transactions that leads to increased systemic risk, which in turn impacts broader society. Providing a channel for financial employees to shed light on their organisations would thus have 1) a democratic empowerment benefit and 2) a research and regulation benefit, providing more material for citizens, academics and regulators to understand and monitor the sector.

The transparency initiative could be split into specific research domains that are of particular concern to researchers, campaigners and regulators. For example, domains could include:

• A high-pay transparency programme to gather leaked payrolls, compensation reports and other material to help in monitoring financial incentive systems
• A tax haven programme to gather lists of subsidiaries, offshore transactions and other material to help shed light on international tax avoidance systems
• A loan transparency programme to gather info on loan portfolios of corporate banking divisions, thereby helping to monitor socially and environmentally irresponsible lending
• A programme gathering info on banks' dealings with Polically Exposed Persons, authoritarian regimes, and dodgy individuals
• A systemic risk programme gathering info on prop trading levels, interbank risk exposures, and shadow banking systems
• A programme collecting info on poor customer service (Aka. treating clients as muppets)

I wouldn’t want to be too flippant about this. After all, in encouraging breaches to confidentiality this does border on illegality. Confidentiality though, is frequently used to block attempts to research real issues of concern. For example, in my research into the potentially damaging effects of commodity speculation, I hit a brick wall in trying to find out how much banks make in their agricultural commodity trading desks. They simply don't report it, and refuse any requests for the information. I'm of the opinion that it would be good for society to have some basic info in that regard, to assess whether this is a problem. Similarly, in my research into Glencore in the DRC, I’d love to find out the beneficial ownerships of the shell companies they do business with there. Is there any back office employee in Glencore who wants to send that to me?

SO NEAR, YET SO FAR: A TREASURE TROVE OF INFORMATION

I understand the problems of breaching confidentiality, and I know that leak sites are far from perfect. There are major issues of how such a site would be structured and who would have access to the leaked info. Would you use a (structurally and politically) centralised Wikileaks structure, or something more decentralised like OpenLeaks (set up by Wikileaks defectors, but still yet to launch). Is it better to promote something more conciliatory and collaborative, more like Wikipedia, to allow people with financial expertise to contribute knowledge? All these questions are worth asking. What I do know though, is that financial secrecy tends to benefit a pretty small swathe of society, whilst affecting a huge swathe, and I'm sure many financial workers would love an opportunity to spread the love by spreading the knowledge.

Then again, I have suspicion that such a site might attract the small problem of the financial blockade.

Peer-to-Peer Review: The State of Academic Bitcoin Research 2014

PHILOSORAPTOR'S RESEARCH, SOON APPEARING IN ECONOMETRICA JOURNAL

I decided to build a rather large database of academic research on Bitcoin. If you'd like to see it, click on the link. It's a Google Doc, and it allows you to comment if you think there is something I've missed. You can also download it as an Excel spreadsheet. It includes academic, and quasi-academic, research papers, journal articles and theses related to Bitcoin.

Admittedly, the definition of 'academic' or 'quasi-academic' is pretty loose. It can include peer-reviewed papers that appear in major journals, to working papers released from university departments and think tanks, to a thesis of a PhD student, to independent research from people with clear expertise.

I built this list because I myself like to write quasi-academic articles on Bitcoin, and have been trying to find good quality analysis of cryptocurrency, frustrated by the huge amounts of spurious opinion churned in the media, and self-promoting rants by opportunists and ideologues.

How I built it: Lots of searching

To build this list, I spent about four days going through different academic search engines. Many of these search facilities found the same papers, but each also tended to find some unique articles that the others didn't. The sites include:

• JSTOR (here)
• ScienceDirect (here)
• IngentaConnect (here)
• Microsoft Academic Search (here)
• SpringerLink (here)
• SSRN (here)
• Taylor & Francis (here)
• Google Scholar (here) (including year-by-year search from 2008)
• Wiley Online Library (here)
• Directory of Open Access Journals (here)
• DiVA-portal (here)
• Econpapers (here)
• ArXiv (here)
• IDEAS (here)
• Oxford Journals (here)
• Cambridge Journals (here)

Open access vs. closed: A bit of both

A lot of the papers in the list are open access, which means you can get them as PDFs or HTML files. Unfortunately though, the top journals tend to be behind corporate-controlled paywalls and require university subscriptions or money to get in. That said, if a paper is closed access, search for it online and you'll often find earlier PDF versions of it floating about, because the authors often publish draft versions or working papers in open access formats before getting them accepted into closed journals.

Language: English

I'm not one of those people who is oblivious to the fact that research exists outside the English language, and I know that it's quite possible that some of the most cutting edge Bitcoin research could be going on in a Chinese university or in a Greek think-tank. Unfortunately I don't speak those languages, so be aware that these are only English language papers.

Quantity of research: Reasonable

A LOT, BUT NOT THAT MUCH

Bitcoin literature is very new. The first paper - Satoshi Nakamoto's paper - came out only in 2008. I could find almost no academic research from 2009 and 2010, and only a trickle in 2011. It's only in 2012 that we start to find a decent amount emerging in the record. It's really in 2013 though, that the big research starts to come. 2014 has by far the most research, and it's in this year that peer-reviewed academic journal articles start to come out.

Bear in mind that peer-review processes for big journals can take years, so it's little surprise that there are so few cryptocurrency articles out in the really big-hitter journals. My prediction for 2015 though, is that there will be a big flood of research, and a significant batch of peer-reviewed journal articles. Good research takes a while to do, especially in the social sciences.

Quality of research: Hmm... 

Quality to some extent is in the eye of the beholder, but I'll be honest - there is a fair amount of crap research out there. For example, I've found 'academic' analyses of Bitcoin from people that work in big universities, that still hold onto archaic beliefs about money emerging from barter. There are also a lot of PDF documents floating about with academic-sounding titles, written by people with academic sounding affiliations, but you never really know how good they are, or if they're written by some enthusiastic second-year students who don't really know what they're talking about.

Peer-reviewed journals obviously demand a certain degree of quality, but being published in a big journal doesn't necessarily mean an article is groundbreaking. It just means you managed to pitch it right, and get past a panel of peers who might have the same biases as you. For example, it's widely suspected that the peer-review process in the big economics journals systematically excludes economic theories that don't follow neo-classical interpretations of markets. To be accepted into the hallowed halls of such journals, one must cow down and play the game, and couch everything in the apolitical language of mathematical equations and spurious models. Needless to say, some of the most interesting economics research is not found in the big prestige economics journals.

So, it's best to treat this list as an initial starting point to launch into papers, and to make your own decisions about how interesting they are.

Research themes: The tech, the law, the economics... the humans

There are a number of themes coming out in the research

1. Firstly, there is a huge amount of technical stuff about the cryptography, computer science, security and systems design. Computer science researchers have clearly enjoyed the chance to get involved in this cutting-edge area. The only problem with this though, is that the quantity of this research drowns out a lot of the equally important social sciences research, and tends to present Bitcoin as a technological issue, rather than a profoundly human phenomenon
2. Secondly, there is a sub-strand of the tech-related research that focuses on how to change Bitcoin, or create a variant of it, or point out some failing it has. See, for example, this piece on a Bitcoin-based emissions trading model
3. Thirdly, there is a pretty big strand of research on the regulatory status, tax status, and legal status of Bitcoin. This is clearly driven by the need to reach some clarity on these questions so that people know how to practically proceed in the short-term. There is also a nascent strand of accounting research - check out, for example, this new piece
4. Fourthly, there is a growing field of economic analyses of Bitcoin, mostly coming from pretty mainstream economics, or from Austrian-style libertarian economics. Like most economics, the attempt is to create models, or to analyse incentive structures, and they will tend to call people 'agents', rather than, well, 'people'. See, for example, this piece coming out in the prestigious Journal of Economic Perspectives
5. Then, finally, there is an emergent trickle of social sciences research on actual humans, including the sociology, anthropology, politics and even ethics of the system. This research remains hugely underrepresented though, which is ironic, because it's by far the most important area of research

Areas that need more attention: Humans

There are a number of areas, in my opinion, that need deeper research and analysis. 

• Bitcoin as money: There are surprisingly few real discussions about the monetary theory embedded in the Bitcoin code, or how it might function as money. The papers on 'the economics of Bitcoin' don't address it deeply enough (but then again, economics has always been pretty shite at money analysis). I'd love to see more deep analyses of the nature of decentralised electronic money, and the social dynamics of such money
• Despite the huge amounts of focus on the technology of Bitcoin, there is still very little critical reflection on the technological politics of Bitcoin, or critical studies of decentralised algorithm-based systems. My piece on the Politics of the Bitcoin Blockchain sketches out areas that need more focus
• Ethnographic studies of Bitcoin: There are a few surveys of Bitcoin users, and some interesting attempts to use social media to analyse users, but there are few true ethnographic studies 
• The geographical dynamics of Bitcoin: Bitcoin is often spoken of as a global currency, but in reality most of the writing about it comes from Americans and Europeans, and many of them sitting in cities. I'd love to see true studies on, for example, whether someone in rural Zimbabwe would actually use cryptocurrency (given that most of my family is from rural Zimbabwe this is not just a throwaway question)

25 interesting looking papers to peruse

I haven't had a chance to read all of these, but here are some really interesting looking articles that are probably not going to get as much attention as they should. 

1. “When perhaps the real problem is money itself!”: the practical materiality of Bitcoin (here): Written by the economic anthropologist Bill Maurer and his collaborators Lana Swartz and Taylor Nelms
2. "BitCoin meets Google Trends and Wikipedia: Quantifying the relationship between phenomena of the Internet era" (here)
3. "Virtual Currency, Tangible Return: Portfolio Diversification with Bitcoins" (here): One for  the investment portfolio analysts
4. "Nowcasting the Bitcoin Market with Twitter Signals" (here)
5. "The digital traces of bubbles: feedback cycles between socio-economic signals in the Bitcoin economy" (here)
6. "Who Uses Bitcoin? An exploration of the Bitcoin community" (here)
7. "Is Bitcoin a Decentralized Currency?" (here)
8. "Testing the Efficient Market Hypothesis on Bitcoin Exchanges" (here)
9. "Alderney: gambling, Bitcoin and the art of unorthodoxy" (here): From the Island Studies Journal, ha ha
10. "Coining Bitcoin's 'legal bits': Examining the regulatory framework for Bitcoin and virtual currencies" (here)
11. "Bitcoin and the legitimacy crisis of money" (here), coming out in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, from Beat Weber. Beat is critical of Bitcoin, and it's worth checking out his other piece in the Journal of Peer Production here
12. "Do the Rich Get Richer? An Empirical Analysis of the Bitcoin Transaction Network" (here)
13. "The (A)Political Economy of Bitcoin" (here) - this one is from Greek commons-based economy advocates from the P2P Lab
14. "Bitcoin: a regulatory nightmare to a libertarian dream" (here), from P2P law expert Primavera de Filippi
15. "Internet architecture and the layers principle: a conceptual framework for regulating Bitcoin"(here), from a Google employee
16. "Characteristics of Bitcoin Users: An Analysis of Google Search Data" (here)
17. "The politics of cryptography: Bitcoin and the ordering machines" (here): This is from Quinn Du Pont, who is doing intriguing work on cryptography political philosophy
18. "The paradoxes of distributed trust: Peer-to-peer architecture and user confidence in Bitcoin"(here)
19. "Synthetic commodity money" (here) - this one is in the Journal of Financial Stability, but free versions are floating around on the internet
20. "The Economics of Bitcoin and Similar Private Digital Currencies" (here) - this one is in the Journal of Financial Stability, but free versions are floating around on the internet
21. "The Ethics of Payments: Paper, Plastic, or Bitcoin?" (here): In the big-hitter Journal of Business Ethics
22. "Are Bitcoin Users Less Sociable? An Analysis of Users’ Language and Social Connections on Twitter" (here): A very intriguing paper, which suggests that 'Bitcoin followers are less likely to mention family, friends, religion, sex, and emotion related words in their tweets and have significantly less social connection to other users on the site'
23. "How Did Dread Pirate Roberts Acquire and Protect his Bitcoin Wealth?" (here): Everyone likes a pirate story
24. "Do libertarians dream of electric coins? The material embeddedness of Bitcoin" (here): Great title, and out in a pretty innovative Scandinavian journal
25. I'll let you decide what number 25 is: Perhaps a paper that you'd like to write?

Enjoy, comment, and please share

Thanks for reading this. If you see any mistakes in the list, or have any suggestions and additions you'd like me to make, please do comment, either here or on the Google Doc. I get sent an email every time that happens so I'll definitely see them. I'll update this list periodically as new pieces come out. Finally, please do share this with people who might find it useful - I spent a fair amount of effort creating this, so I want it to be as useful as possible.

Lastly: Much energy went into this, so feel free to buy me a beer

This took me at least four days to build and double-check, and it was pretty damn exhausting. If it's useful to you, and helps you in your own research or enlightenment, please do consider supporting me. Here are three things you could do:

• Donate bitcoin to: 18TyygKmmW1xnXLBJ1q5BtBEAAaMGfrbhn 
• Or buy me a virtual beer!
• Share on Twitter or Reddit

ME BTC ADDRESS

The Ghost of Christmas Past: Merry films of Lehman's Fall

I have no family in the UK, so I always exhibit strange behaviour on Christmas day. Last year I wondered around the City of London and took photos of empty bank offices, after which I attended a wedding of two Occupy protesters on the steps of St. Paul's cathedral. This year I wandered around Brixton and took photos, including one of the Space Invader mosaic above the chicken & chips shop on Coldharbour Lane, before going home to watch THREE whole films on the fall of Lehman Brothers.

GANDALF VISITS MORDOR

Lehman has always held a special place in my heart because I had two interviews there in 2008, mere weeks before it collapsed. I sat up on the 36th floor and was questioned by men whose job it was to ascertain the robustness of my character. One of them said "you may have heard things in the press about us being in the shit, but these are the exaggerations of melodramatic journalists". A week later I was having another interview there, but little did I know that they were in the midst of negotiations with the Korea Development Bank, trying to convince them to inject much-needed capital in the bank. The MD interviewing me was a little distracted, though in my naive state, I wrote it off as normal MD-like behaviour, rather than the product of him being at a bank on the verge of crumbling.

The action behind the scenes leading up to final Lehman implosion is fascinating. Perhaps most striking is just how arbitrary the process was. In one dramatic weekend the US treasury secretary Hank Paulson hauled the CEOs of America's top banks into the New York Fed, and said, in a nutshell, "I bailed out Bear Stearns, now you guys must bail out Lehman". The negotiations hinged on whether Goldman, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and a few other banks could agree to take on Lehman's bad assets in order to induce Bank of America or Barclays to buy the rest of Lehman. The famous twist in the tale comes when Merrill Lynch's John Thain cuts a private deal with Bank of America to save Merrill instead of Lehman. This leaves Barclays as the only possible suitor, but the deal runs into trouble with the UK regulators, leaving Lehman to collapse, only to be picked up by Barclays anyway at a much cheaper price. These are the basic events focused on by the three films I watched. To help you take your pick, I've given each film a rating below:

Film 1: The Last days of Lehman (2009)

A crap made-for-TV film if ever there was, but worth a brief watch to see the awesome James Cromwell playing Hank Paulson. Cromwell incidentally plays the Nazi eugenics doctor in the incredible series American Horror Story, and seems equally at home with both characters. It's debatable whether Hank Paulson can be compared to a genocidal scientist, but he certainly has helped to create financial monsters. In the final analysis, Cromwell saves an otherwise dismal cast of buffoon-like characters, and drags the film's rating up to 5.5/10.

Film 2: Too Big to Fail (2011)
This film portrays the same events as the Last Days of Lehman, only it does with much more style. William Hurt pulls a great performance of Hank Paulson, but the highlight of the film for me was Paul Giametti playing Ben Bernanke. The guy who plays Goldman Sach's CEO Lloyd Blankfein is also very entertaining. It's based on the book of the same name by Andrew Ross Sorkin, who himself appears as a journalist in the film. It's light on technical detail of what was going on, but is overall pretty well acted and scripted, giving a reasonably realistic human face to the key players. I give this one 7/10.

Film 3: The Love of Money - The Bank that Bust the World (2009)

A quality BBC documentary with some heavy hitters being interviewed, including Bob Diamond and Gordon Brown, plus several of the main players during the fall of the bank. It's the traditional talking-heads style, so no great prizes for innovation, but it gives a solid account of the chaotic Lehman balls-up. I reckon it earns 7.5/10, maybe even 8 if you've had a few whiskeys.

Suitpossum does Youtube

In conclusion, I've decided to launch a little Youtube Channel to showcase some of these videos. I'm thinking of calling it Suitpossum's Guide to Global Finance channel. It doesn't have much on it yet, but I'll be making useful playlists, and maybe even creating my own videos. Exciting times.