There is a lovely article in the Daily Telegraph about Barclays being in denial about the size of the losses that it needs to take. One thing that caught my eye was the following: It has even been suggested that Barclays chose not to offload its Alliance Boots debt, when others in the banking syndicate took a 10 per cent valuation cut to get the assets off their books, because Varley and Diamond wanted to protect the minimal writedowns on leverage loans. Well you might say that. I couldn't possibly comment. Anybody looked lately at their consumer lender exposure in Japan? I couldn't possibly comment. How about just the almost total absence of losing trading days in the investment bank. I couldn't possibly comment. Anyone you know carried an 800 billion pound investment bank portfolio and not lost money on at least some days... I couldn't possibly comment. How about the ...

Another ETF filing with a hat tip to IndexUniverse. WisdomTree has filed for the Middle East Dividend Fund that will include Bahrain, Dubai, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The prospectus has no info on country weightings (none that I found anyway) but surprisingly 54% of the companies have market caps greater than $2 billion. WisdomTree has an awful lot of very interesting funds on the shelf that I'd love to see list but thus far have not. Some of the filings are so old now that I doubt they will list so we'll see if this middle east fund ever lists or not. One thing seems pretty clear to me, frontier markets will open up to investors one way or another pretty quickly. PowerShares has a frontier fund in the works which takes in a few other countries ...