Nominations for Financial Idiot of the Year
I was a bit premature announcing Kwasi Kwarteng as winner of this year’s prestigous Financial Idiot of the Year.
Readers have pointed out there are a large number of other contenders. I have drawn up a short list of other names, and reopened the nomination book. If you have other names whose contribution to financial stupidity should be acknowledged, send your nominations to billblain@morningporridge.com, or post them below!
Currrent contenders include:
Kwasi Kwarteng: UK Chancellor who broke the Gilts Market and then celebrated with a bunch of hedge fund managers shorting sterling.
President Nayib Bukele: El Salvador’s President who redefined Jack and the Beanstalk by using his nation’s last remaining reserves to buy 88 Bitcoin, while declaring “Bitcoin is the future!”
Cathie Wood: ARC’s Maven CEO has lost 65% of her net worth as her bets on disruption, Tesla and crypto collapsed, but is still promising yesterday’s trades will come good tomorrow.
Mark Zuckerberg: CEO of Meta has seen his stock price collapse while laying off 11,000 engineers to cut costs to finance his attempts to dominate whatever the Metaverse might be. Meanwhile Facebook fades into irrelevancy – just like Friends Reunited.
Elon Musk: The takeover of Twitter is just extraordinary – but there may be a spark of genius behind it (at least that is what his fanboys hope!)
Sam Bankman-Fried: The collapse of FTX and his subsequent “not-my-fault-because-I-didn’t-know” excuses may just have destroyed crypto – we should probably give him a medal.
Su Zhu and Kyle Davis: Founders of Three Arrows Capital which brought the delights of a leverage driven hedge fund collapse to the crypto world.
Thurrock Council: A modest sized Conservative county-council managed to lose over £500mm on dodgy private debt lending to Irish home builders and loan companies.. will they never learn?
Ulrich Koerne: With the stock sinking over 60%, the CEO of Credit Suisse sent round a memo assuring staff of the depth of the bank’s capital reserves and financial stability, triggering immediate panic on their job security. Schoolboy error.
Keep them coming…
Bill Blain
Stategist – Shard Capital
Readers have added:
Rishi Sunak for not chasing Bounceback loans..
Liz Truss for “ignoring completely the existence of the financial markets and putting absurd ideology ahead of reality, ie for fairy tale economics.”
Andrew Bailey, not so much for what he’s done, though a BE Gov predicting recession shows some awareness of the implications of his own actions, more for taking the gig in the first place, its like with Truss was she in on the joke or did they just rely on her own incompetence.
Harsh.
But everyone is entitled to a perspective…
I’m going with Musk. Whether he’s and idiotic savant or simply a very lucky idiot maybe an open debate but he is an idiot never the less. I wish there weren’t so many poster children for confiscatory wealth taxes – I would prefer that number be zero.
I would put forth the EU, though I fear there are not enough medals to go around.