and manipulation. A nice cozy complicity. How to understand Bob Diamond? Maybe he rose to his level of incompetence. Or, perhaps we can compare Diamond to what writer Jean Genet once said said about himself, that the only thing he could do was to be a genius,but when he wasn’t being that, he was simply another bad thief. Marshall McLuhan’s oft used quote is also applicable if we change the word art for business, “art is what you can get away with.”
…Bob Diamond as radical poet. An Arthur Rimbaud of the financial world, showing us proof in the pudding of his own earnest engagement towards Rimbaud’s “disordering of the senses,” within the context of his, on behalf of Barclay’s metaphorical artistic and sexual relationship with the market and Bank of England based on Rimbaud’s then radical theory of the reinvention of language; though Diamond retains the boorish qualities of Rimbaud, he only brings out his lice ridden clothes for special occasions, he does tend to milk situations as Rimbausd did with Verlaine, with utmost impunity.Rimbaud believed he could become a seer through the re-invention of language, what he called the “alchemy of the word” and the “re-ordering of the senses.”
…On July 3rd the chief executive of Barclays resigned with immediate effect—almost a week after the bank paid fines of £290m to regulators who found its staff had attempted to manipulate LIBOR, a benchmark interest rate.
—Barclays is striving hard to distinguish two sorts of misconduct relating to LIBOR. The first kind—the doctoring of borrowing quotes in the hope of benefitted the bank’s trading positions—was clearly wrong. But lowering its LIBOR quotes to calm fears about Barclays’ own financial health might be considered more forgivable: why tell the whole truth about your borrowing costs if others are lying about theirs? And that is especially so if you believe the central bank has leaned on you to do just that.—Read More:http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/07/barclays-woes image:http://www.moviesonline.ca/2010/10/8-picks-for-halloween-movies/peter-lorre-m-1/
…Hurrah! the wind whistles at the skeletons’ grand ball!
The black gallows moans like an organ of iron !
The wolves howl back from the violet forests:
And on the horizon the sky is hell-red…
Ho there, shake up those funereal braggarts,
Craftily telling with their great broken fingers
The beads of their loves on their pale vertebrae:
Hey the departed, this is no monastery here!
Oh! but see how from the middle of this Dance of Death
Springs into the red sky a great skeleton, mad,
Carried away by his own impetus, like a rearing horse:
And, feeling the rope tight again round his neck,…(Rimbaud, Dance of the Hanged Men)
Yet Mr Diamond was unapologetic even as he said goodbye, citing the intolerable “external pressure” on Barclays as the reason for his resignation—rather than accepting that he was ultimately responsible for the misdeeds that took place on his watch as head of Barclays Capital, the bank’s investment banking arm….Read More:http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/07/barclays-and-libor-scandal?page=2
—Today, Rimbaud is considered to have been one of the first proponents of the free verse style and a predecessor to the surrealists. In his two Letters Of The Visionary to Izambard and Demeny, Rimbaud writes
“The poet should make himself a seer by a long, immense, deliberate disorder of all the senses”.
Read More:http://www.art-rimbaud.de/html/e-art-rimbaud-bio-text-1.htm image:http://nicholasdynan.com/blog/?p=252
Where Rimbaud was the opposite of our post-modern world’s inauthentic, contrived, mining of madness, maybe Bob Diamond is simply mad and we just assume him to be a lousy prevaricator, on the top of a parapet choosing to jump into Genet’s genius or crummy thief. Diamond knew the difference between the intrinsic value of what was being traded and the extrinsic value of these financial instruments was only based on the nebulous principle of exchange value, the arbitrage between money equivalents. If anything, these hearings only highlight our entire society’s dependence on money and how our consciousness of money is completely pervasive, informing everything in society, overwhelming everything and coercing anything and everything to surrender, submit, to its allegedly higher values suggests the superiority of money over everything. Indeed, the public spectacle of watching Diamond goaltending the queries seems to affirm capitalism, and our own desire to estheticize money through all our cultural and technological apparatus that delivers the information and filters it down to the lowest levels of money worship which is the underclasses yanking on one-armed bandits or exchanging food stamps for lottery tickets…
-caption-text">—Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Berliner Strassenszene
1913—
…DID the Bank of England sanction the submission of false LIBOR quotes in the heat of the financial crisis? Documents released today by Barclays bank include a note-to-self written on October 29th 2008 by Bob Diamond (who resigned today as the bank’s chief executive, pictured, right) immediately after a telephone conversation with Paul Tucker, a deputy governor of the Bank of England.
According to the note, Mr Tucker told Mr Diamond he had received concerned calls from senior figures in Whitehall about Barclays. They asked why the borrowing costs the bank submitted each day to the panel setting LIBOR, a benchmark interest rate, were always amongst the highest. At the time, Barclays was thought to be having trouble raising cash in the inter-bank market, a potential sign of deeper troubles….Read More:http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/07/barclays-woes
…Clenches his knuckles on his thighbone with a crack
Uttering cries like mocking laughter,
And then like a mountebank into his booth,
Skips back into the dance to the music of the bones!
On the black gallows, one-armed friend,
The paladins are dancing, dancing
The lean, the devil’s paladins
The skeletons of Saladins.( Rimbaud)
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