Through the tangle of green shoots and sprouting mustard seeds, a certain nervous view persists that the arc of events is taking us to places unimaginable.  The collapse of General Motors and Chrysler signifies more than the collapse of US car manufacturing.  It spells the end of the motoring era in America per se and the puerile fantasy of personal liberation that allowed it to become such a curse to us.

Of course, many Nobel prize-winning economists would argue that it has only been a blessing for us, but that only shows how the newspapers are committing suicide-by-irrelevance. And if other societies, such as China’s late-entry industrial start-up, want to adopt a similar fantasy, they will only find themselves all the sooner in history’s garage with a tailpipe in their mouths.

Here in the USA, we will mount the most strenuous campaign to keep the motoring system going — in fact, we’re

‘What’s the difference between a hedge fund manager and a pigeon? A pigeon can still place a deposit on a Porsche.’That joke rings true after Porsche impoverished many of its prospective clients, creating the most outrageous single stock squeeze in history last week by ruthlessly cornering the market in VW stock. This left only a 6% free float, causing the price to soar almost five fold in a couple of days as hedge funds and bank trading desks scrambled to close their 12% short position at any price. They were mostly playing a supposedly ‘low risk’ long preference/short ordinary strategy, and many reputable funds were involved. It looks like they lost far more money in VW (up to $10bn) than on the orderly Lehman CDS settlement, fears of which had propelled the market crash in recent weeks, and is another nail in the …

‘What’s the difference between a hedge fund manager and a pigeon? A pigeon can still place a deposit on a Porsche.’That joke rings true after Porsche impoverished many of its prospective clients, creating the most outrageous single stock squeeze in history last week by ruthlessly cornering the market in VW stock. This left only a 6% free float, causing the price to soar almost five fold in a couple of days as hedge funds and bank trading desks scrambled to close their 12% short position at any price. They were mostly playing a supposedly ‘low risk’ long preference/short ordinary strategy, and many reputable funds were involved. It looks like they lost far more money in VW (up to $10bn) than on the orderly Lehman CDS settlement, fears of which had propelled the market crash in recent weeks, and is another nail in the …