Another good catch from http://karmabanqueradio.com/?p=143 "> S&M . With the looming invasion of Iran the markets are going to be devastating to the genral public.

Hedge funds can arrest the development of whole economies, and they have the potential to crash the financial system. It has almost happened before. In 1998 the Fed persuaded the "Fourteen Families" (an apposite Mafia reference) of Wall Street - the major banks - to cough up money for a $3.6bn bailout for Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund whose bets went wrong. The Fed said at the time that LTCM's failure had been abrupt and disorderly and had posed "unacceptable risks to the American economy".

Hedge funds are not new - just notorious. They started to take off properly in the late 1970s when floating exchange rates and volatile interest-rate movements transformed the capital markets, and gathered momentum as technology and electronic trading became increasingly quick and sophisticated. The funds were - and are - run typically by a tight group of traders, backed usually by fewer than a hundred individuals prepared to commit a great deal of money into their hands. Today, it is estimated that there are 9,000 funds and what started as a US phenomenon is spreading - though the FSA estimates that there are at present only 325 hedge funds based in the UK.

The key features of these funds are that they trade in eye-watering risk and they are barely regulated. The two are related. Because they answer to nobody but themselves, hedge funds have side-stepped regulation and can do as they like. What they like is risk - and their main tool is "leverage" - borrowing to play the markets. It is not unusual for a hedge-fund investor to control $100m in securities with only a $5m down payment. Of course, that means that when a bet goes wrong, it goes spectacularly wrong. If the hedge-fund industry's positions in the market are 20 times the cash they actually hold, their potential impact on the world financial system is about equal to US GDP.

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