My first crowdfunding campaign! Help me start a school for financial activism

I've taken a leap into the world of crowdfunding this week as I launch my first Indiegogo campaign. I'm aiming to raise seed funding for a London-based School of Financial Activism. Please do click on the link to take a look at the campaign, and if you feel inspired, I'd love for you to contribute to it!

As I've already mentioned in a previous post, I've got a book on the financial system coming out called The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money. I want to launch the School of Financial Activism as a way to build on themes I've developed in the book, and to help everyday people grapple with and challenge the financial sector. As a reward for contributing, I'm offering four uber-cool limited edition series of the book, as follows:

• The Junior Trader series: 100 softcovers, signed and delivered
• The Hardass Cityboys: 25 hardcovers, one for each of the 25 wards of the City of London, along with a discount voucher for the school of financial activism
• The Hedge Fund Gamblers: 5 hardcovers, with a special gift, and a voucher for the future courses at the school
• The Three Hackers: 3 hardcovers with bespoke covers, and a voucher for the future courses at the school

Of course, if you contribute you also get the pleasure of knowing that you've helped me start an awesome educational initiative. If you're hard up for cash, no worries - you can also help out by simply spreading the campaign around on Twitter, Facebook and Email. You can use the following link http://igg.me/at/financialactivism/x/2406554.

I'll keep you posted on how the campaign goes. Please help me make it a success! Please do post suggestions for both the crowdfunding campaign, and the course, in the comments section below. Cheers

Tools for financial education: Stockmarket Pearltrees

USE PEARLTREES INSTEAD BRO

I've been experimenting with Pearltrees as a tool for financial education. If you've never used Pearltrees before, it's a cool technology for arranging information, sites and other media into organisational trees. I used it in my last post on Goldman Sachs to show how the company is arranged, and this week I've been experimenting with it as a tool to visually represent the FTSE 100 index. The FTSE 100 is an index of the 100 largest publicly-listed companies in the UK, constituting a major chunk of the UK economy. You can explore the Pearltree in the box below, but for greater functionality, go direct to it here.

Click on the various pearls to explore the diagram. Clicking on an individual company launches a pop-up window with information. As you can see, it's a pretty simple and intuitive way to present an otherwise abstract list of companies, allowing you to hone in on the various industry sectors (note how dominant finance and mining companies are in the FTSE), and to get easy access to company wikipedia pages and websites.

Forthcoming attractions

I AM SOOO EXCITED!

I'm going to create more Pearltrees for other major global stockmarket indices. It takes a bit of time to create each one, so I've drawn up a list below of the indices that I want to target, and then as I create the Pearltrees I'll fill the links in.

1) The Dow Jones Industrial: Almost complete here

2) The Hang Seng Index (Hong Kong)
3) The CAC 40 (French)
4) The Dax (German)
5) Sensex 30 (Indian)
6) The IBEX 35 (Spanish)
7) The Nikkei 225 (Japanese)
8) The S&P / TSX 60 (Canadian)
9) Bolsa IPC (Mexican)
10) FTSE/JSE Top40 (South African)
11) CSI 300 (Chinese)
12) Bovespa (Brazilian)

On the other hand, it is possible that I will grow bored of creating Pearltrees out of the world's most powerful companies. Maybe I'll get an intern to do the rest, or a kindly team of volunteers. If you know of any other cool ways of visualising massive stock indices please let me know - Pearltrees has its limitations and I'm interested to find other tools. Hope you find this useful.

Combating Goldman Sachsophobia: Two resources for making Vampire Squid Calamari

Hiss...

In 2010 Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi infamously referred to Goldman Sachs as a Vampire Squid, a term that has since then become something of an overused meme (even Taibbi has expressed ambivalence about it). He's but one individual who's tapped into disturbing imagery to describe Goldman though: For example, the other day I picked up Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs came to Rule the World by Steven Cohan, repleat with a golden snake on the cover, poised to strike. The sentiment was echoed by Alesio Rastani, the trader who upset everyone by saying Goldman rules the world.

I have no doubt that Goldman is a powerful company, and yes, they've been involved in some corrupt-as-hell deals (check out Senator Carl Levin's scathing report about them), but I sometimes suspect that the public hype around the company merely helps to reinforce it's existing self-image - presented in sanitised form in their graduate recruitment videos - as a repository for society's 'best & brightest' destined for  ubermensch greatness. Let's face it though: The average Goldman employee is statistically more likely to be a meek PhD student than a bad-ass Gordon Gekko, or for that matter, a balls-to-the-wall Richard Branson. When I ask "what kind of person aspires to work for Goldman", I see someone who seeks acceptance by the winning team. Would underdog  rogues like Chuck Norris apply for their graduate recruitment programme? Hell no!

Resource 1: What does Goldman Sachs do? An epic pearltree organisational chart
In the interests of breaking down some of the mystique around the Vampire Squid though, I made the following Pearltree diagram (Click on the title to open in a new tab):

It's not rocket science - I just went through their website and put all the pieces in order. Click on any division to expand it and see what they get up to. Over time I'm going to add more information to this, and do it for other banks too, so I'll keep you posted on that. Their securities division is the most important division in the firm, with their investment banking, investment management and 'investing and lending' (direct investing) divisions coming in tie after that. I'd say the 'investing and lending' section is worth more investigation - it's now reputed to be a source of undercover proprietary trading activities. I've included something called the 'nerve centre', which is all the departments (such as treasury and IT) that normally get overlooked, but that make the whole edifice work. Ping me a message if you think anything else should be on there.

Resource 2: Who's wants to watch Blankfein dance!

For anyone with an hour & a half to spare, I've created a Goldman Sachs video list on Youtube called, Goldman Sachs: A List of Diverse Opinions. It includes the CNBC documentary Power & Peril, which is pretty decent if you're looking for something substantial, but if you're looking for some shorter pieces, I comissioned a music video by a new band called Government Sachs, entitled Me and my Bitches. Of all the theories as to Goldman's success - superhuman talent, witchcraft etc - I think the strongest theory concerns its immense lobbying power, and the accompanying internal culture that encourages their people to seek positions of power later in life. The subtle dynamics of this process are brought out in this exchange between James Altucher and Jim Cramer (starting at around 1:20). Whatever the case, I'm going to join David Attenborough in continuing to observe the actions of the vampire squid (vampyroteuthis). If you have any insights on how to understand it's behaviour, or any other interesting videos, please do comment. Cheers

What are the 100 Top (Anglo-Saxon) Finance Blogs? A Pseudo-Scientific Study

I know what you're thinking: How on earth would I be able to read, let alone rank, 100 blogs? The answer is simple: I have a METHODOLOGY!... and it's about as scientific as a model used to work out the value of a junk-bond backed CLO. Yes, I've taken something completely subjective and added a spurious quantitative element to it. Given that this is standard practice in the financial industry, there should be no problem.

The Methodology

A category like 'financial blogs' is somewhat loose: I've included blogs that focus on analysis of financial news, blogs that waffle about trading and investment strategies, and more general economics blogs that provide analysis relevant to financial markets. Personal finance sites though, are excluded, so no Mint.com. The methodology is based on 3 voting rounds, during which points are scored. Let me explain...

Voting round 1: The List-Makers

As a starting point, I sought to identify four pre-existing 'best of' lists that appeared to be relatively reputable. There were actually surprisingly few of these, but I settled on the following four: 

• Time Magazine's list: The 25 Best Financial Blogs
• A list from John Carney of CNBC: The Best Alternative Financial Blogs
• Downtown Josh Brown's list: Who are the Five Best Financial Bloggers
• MarketWatch's Jon Friedman: Six Wall Street Blogs you should be reading

Each recommendation from these lists counted as a Round 1 Vote. I got 25 from Time, 6 from MarketWatch, 21 from CNBC (this list actually had 18 main suggestions, but mentions 3 others), and 13 from Downtown Josh Brown (his list has 5 major recommendations, but a series of secondary recommendations too). That gives us 55 initial votes from pundits who were prepared to put their reputation on the line.

Voting round 2: The winners of Round 1

I decided that if a blog received two votes or more from Round 1, that blogger was then eligible to vote too. How would they do that? Simple - I used their blogroll as a proxy: A blogroll is a list of blogs recommended by a blogger, an implicit vote of confidence if ever there was one.

The top blogs emerging from Round 1 were Business Insider (Joe Weisenthal), Calculated Risk (Bill McBride), Dealbreaker (Bess Levin), The Big Picture (Barry Ritholz), Pragmatic Capitalism (Cullen Roche), Felix Salmon, Zero Hedge, Abnormal Returns (Tadas Viskanta), FT Alphaville, Naked Capitalism (Yves Smith), Reformed Broker (Josh Brown), and Dealbook. Not all had blogrolls though, but I managed to find 282 blogroll votes from Naked Capitalism, Calculated Risk, The Big Picture, Zero Hedge and FT Alphaville.

Voting round 3: Up-and-comers from Round 2

I used a similar process for Round 3. This time, if a blog had received three or more votes of approval from Round 2 and and Round 1, their blogrolls were eligible to be drawn into the vote pool too. The Up-and-Comers included Brad DeLong, Paul Krugman, Econbrowser, Mish's Global Economic Analysis, Credit Writedowns, The Epicurean Dealmaker, Infectious Greed, The Aleph Blog, Minyanville, MarketBeat, Angry Bear, China Financial Markets, Jesse's Café Américain, Oil Price, The Economic Populist, Cassandra does Tokyo, Economist's View, Interfluidity, and Financial Armageddon. I rounded up the blogrolls of those that had them, and harvested another 1074 votes.

Weighting the Votes

To compile the final list, I weighted the votes. The votes from Round 1 were worth 4 points - because they were from explicit 'best of' lists that had been actively created. The votes from Round 2 were worth 2.5 points, because they were from more passive blogrolls, and the votes from Round 3 were worth 1.5 points. These points are somewhat arbitrary, but the results remain roughly similar even when I use slightly different point weightings. Besides, it's my list. So, here it is, split into four quartiles (please note that only the first quartile is ranked in exact order - thus, while Naked Capitalism is No.2, a blog in quartile 3 is somewhere between 50-75. I don't feel the need for spurious accuracy).

THE F-100

CLICK FOR LARGER VERSION!

Top24	Q2	Q3	Q4
Calculated Risk	Cassandra does Tokyo	TheMoneyIllusion	Daneric's Elliott Waves
Naked Capitalism	Financial Armageddon	The Research Puzzle	Dr. Housing Bubble
The Big Picture	Jesse's Cafe Americain	Macro-Man	Global Econ Matters
FT Alphaville	Oil Price	Macro Market Musings	Greg Mankiw
Felix Salmon	Minyanville	PeakProsperity	Liberty Str. Economics
Business Insider	WSJ MarketBeat	Streetwise Professor	Macroblog
Dealbreaker	Economix	The Burning Platform	Max Keiser
Abnormal Returns	Marginal Revolution	Tim Iacono	Modeled Behavior
Zero Hedge	Real Time Economics	The Oil Drum	Next New Deal
Econbrowser	Rortybomb	Megan McArdle	Psy-Fi Blog
Paul Krugman	Von Mises Institute	World Beta	re: The Auditors
Economist's View	The Economic Populist	Alea	The Market Ticker
Credit Writedowns	The Aleph Blog	A Dash of Insight	WSJ Deal Journal
Reformed Broker	Epicurean Dealmaker	Bespoke Investment	Distressed Debt Invest
Angry Bear	Credit Slips	Eschaton	Brazilian Bubble
Mish’s GlobalEcon	VoxEU	iMFdirect	Macrobusiness
Interfluidity	Falkenblog	Marc to Market	Money is the way
Brad DeLong	Ezra Klein	Market Montage	Automatic Earth
Dealbook	Freakonomics	Testosterone Pit	DollarCollapse
The Baseline Scenario	Beat the Press	AllAboutAlpha	Environmental Econ
China Financial Markets	Bronte Capital	Bonddad Blog	Pension Pulse
Infectious Greed	Roubini GlobalEcon	Boom Bust Blog	Q-Finance
Pragmatic Capitalism	Free Exchange	Capital Gains & Games	Robert Reich
Of Two Minds	Footnoted	Capital Spectator	Worthwhile Canadian
	Jeff Matthews	Coyote Blog	No.100: Your Choice!
	Market Folly

So, who is No. 100?
That's for you to decide. The list needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, because I've derived it from pre-existing opinions from respected, but comparatively mainstream commentators and their blogrolls. Not only have I assumed that their opinion is valid, but I've also assumed that there is no group-think or systematic bias from well-known bloggers reinforcing each other's positions with reciprocal links. Perhaps we should call the list the "Top 100 mainstream anglo-saxon finance bloggers who have already been discovered". It doesn't include all the cool smaller blogs that don't post as regularly, or who have weirder things to say. That said, I'm very pleased that the deranged rantings of Michael Fowke from Money is the Way got on - his blog is so surreal that many people don't get it, but it really captures something of the absurd hubris of financial institutions. I'd really like to see Ian Fraser's blog on there, and Tim Johnson's Magic, Maths & Money: Both of them got votes in Round 3, but not enough to get on the main list. I'll have to start work on another list of more marginal (and perhaps more subversive) bloggers - please send me any suggestions!

By the way, if you want some more good lists of financial blogs, check this huge list here, this one here, and this useful site here.

---

Some things to do if you enjoyed this article...

I sometimes spend weeks writing these articles, and don't generally get paid to do it, so if you enjoyed please consider doing one or two of the following

1. Support by buying me a virtual beer
2. Submit to Reddit
3. Link to the article from your own blog so your readers can see it too

799E2PRVM3GZ

Culture-Jamming with the Lords of Finance: Jamie & Bob

BEAR STEARNS (2008)

DIMON: "A PIECE OF ART CLOSE TO MY HEART"

I have many artists in my family - for example, my mother creates psychedelic textile art, and my uncle  Stidy is a political cartoonist - but I feel over the last few years that I've been giving too little attention to the dark arts of art. So, welcome to my first exhibition.

It all started when I was messing around with one of those demotivational poster generators. I was reflecting on the sad greatness of the now departed Bear Stearns, and Shakespeare came to mind with the speech of Mark Antony, when he says "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears, so that I can sell them to an investment bank that wants to securitise them". One thing led to another, and I created my first masterwork. I called it simply, Bear Stears, but it is now known amongst collectors as 'ear 'ear.

When I first put it out for auction on Ebay, the piece wasn't well understood, it's meaning opaque like a Cayman Islands SPV. But, there was one man whose heart it captured, and he offered me $10 a share for it. He was my first patron, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon.

I do dedications

I was inspired by Jamie's bold leadership of JP Morgan, and also wanted to keep him sweet so that he'd buy more of my art, so, in honour of him, I made a special edition print called The Dirty Work. It was a simple portrait against the backdrop of his respected asset management division, showing his understated elegance. I pinged him an email with a JPG copy, but his personal assistant replied saying "Jamie says you've hurt his feelings and should go screw yourself". I'm still confused by this response, but I think he's a bit sensitive because his company is being sued for Bear Stearns 'Shit Breather' mortgage bonds.

A CONTROVERSIAL PIECE: THE DIRTY WORK (2011): £13 000

I do commissions

You learn to deal with the rejection in the art world though. As it happens, there was a silver lining, because Bob Diamond saw The Dirty Work at a distressed asset auction. He was impressed, and called me up on Skype, saying he was nostalgic for Barclays and that he wanted a piece reflecting on his tenure at the bank that he was thrown out of. I was sensitive to his wishes. I created a work called Libortarian Dreams, featuring dreamy blue imagery from his past. Bob, unlike Jamie, was very happy with it.

LIBORTARIAN DREAMS (2012)

MR DIAMOND: MY HAPPY PATRON!

I do deep social commentary
It's all too easy for an artist to become slaves to their patrons and to lose touch with the everyday person. This is why I do special edition print runs of more down-to-earth creatures, like Morland, the Merrill Lynch Bull. Morland has always felt objectified on Merrill's logo (they even incorrectly refer to him as 'Dollar') and wanted to use his position to draw attention to the plight of less fortunate cattle in the factory farming industry. He helped me design, and posed for, a touching piece called Bully Beef.

BULLY BEEF (£450)

Morland was kind enough to pose for me in another print too, featuring my brother reflecting on a nuclear explosion that I made on PaintShop. Both of these prints go for the meagre sums of £450, payable also in Bitcoin.

TALKING BULL: £450

So, what do you do? Become an artist
Pablo Picasso once said "What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only his eyes if he is a painter, or his ears if he is a musician?... On the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly on the alert to the heart-rending, burning, or happy events in the world, molding himself in their likeness." He also said "there ought to be an absolute dictatorship of painters", so go out, ye dictators and be merry, paint Canary Wharf in bright canary yellow, Wall Street in emerald green and Hong Kong in neon lava orange. Send me your images, and I'll put them up.

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.

The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money

[Note: An up to date blogpost about the book appears here, and the book's page is here]

This blog has been on the down low over the last few months because I've been writing a book. The book is now finished, 78 579 words aimed at  providing a gateway for an individual to gain access to the matrix of global finance. It's called The Heretic's Guide To Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money. 

It will be published in May 2013 by Pluto Press, a fantastic independent publisher based in Highgate, London, who have published such societal shitstirrers as Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Vandana Shiva, Susan George, and John Holloway, amongst others.

I've often found that I'll read an interesting book providing a critique of the financial system, but then I'll put it down and that's kind of the end of it. I store the info away somewhere and pull it out during a conversation maybe, but I don't really act on it. Thus, when Pluto approached me to write a book on finance, I decided it would be good to create something that stays with the reader after they put it down, a manuscript that sets in motion certain heretical processes within that individual, perhaps a self-reinforcing critical impulse that culminates in them becoming a subversive financial ninja or sorts, or a Shaolin fighting monk of finance, disrupting capital flows around the world in the cause of social and ecological justice.

To do that, The Heretic's Guide sets out a framework for approaching the financial system based on anthropology, gonzo exploration, the Hacker ethos, DIY culture, activist entrepreneurialism, drag queens, rogue magicians, guerilla gardening, bats, dolphins, OpenSource culture, network disruption, circuitbending, and you.  In essence it's about jamming systems of power in the cause of democratic openness. Pretty simple actually. It's going into production now, and more publicity will start to come out early next year.

In the mean time, I'm going to try recover. If you've ever wondered what it's like to write a book in six months, the picture below says it all, ha ha. I've come some way since I started this blog, and now I need a week of sleep. Over and out.

THE PATIENT WAS ADMITTED ON TUESDAY, SHOWING SIGNS OF DISORIENTATION