Trainee Investment banker J Dahmer: click for more

Leading City of London financial expert Brian Basham blamed the banking crisis on amoral psychopathic bosses, this week, quoting extensively from Clive R Boddy’s new paper ‘The Corporate Psychopaths: Theory of the Global Financial Crisis’.

Writing in the Independent, the senior financial PR and financial journalist recalled discussing with a ‘senior UK investment banker the most successful banking types we know and what makes them tick’, telling him top traders tended to ‘conform to the characteristics displayed by social psychopaths.’

“To my surprise, my friend agrees,” he said.

“He then makes an astonishing confession: “At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles”,” he revealed. (Independent; http://ind.pn/s42ZB8 )

Mr Boddy’s new ‘bankers are psychos’ study was published less than 2 months after Swiss researchers reached similar conclusions after compared traders with psychopaths in prison.

“Naturally one can’t characterize the traders as deranged,” prison boss Thomas Noll told Der SPIEGEL in November.

“But for example, they behaved more egotistically and were more willing to take risks than a group of psychopaths who took the same test.” (Der Spiegel: http://bit.ly/pfex7Q )

Similarly amoral and reckless corporate chiefs also featured heavily in an article written by Top British commentator Max Hastings this week, following revelations that equally egotistical ex Prime Minister Tony Blair paid just £315,000 in tax last year on his business turnover of over £12million last year.

Notoriously egotistical and reckless ex-Prime Minister turned multi-millionaire ‘consultant’ Tony Blair appeared in the British press again this week after details emerged of how his secretive web of companies paid just £315,000 in tax on turnover of over £12million.

Dancing Tony- click for moew

Top British commentator Max Hastings summed up the revelations succinctly in an article in the Mail, appositely headlined ‘Tony Blair’s tiny tax bill and the foul stench of fat-cat greed’.

Headlining his article appositely ‘Tony Blair’s tiny tax bill and the foul stench of fat-cat greed’ the erstwhile editor of the Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard was deeply unimpressed.

“When we see unbridled greed grip the entire corporate culture; and when the men in suits seem happy to keep driving their yachts full speed through seas bobbing with the human and financial wreckage of the European economic crisis, something must give,” Mr Hastings suggested.

“Insult is added to injury by seeing Tony Blair’s snout buried in the trough of bank consultancy fees, jetting around the world pocketing millions while the British people whom New Labour steered over a financial cliff struggle to regain solvency.” (Daily Mail: http://bit.ly/xpC9vs )

http://bit.ly/k786Jd (Journal of Business Ethics: Clive R Boddy: “The Corporate Psychopaths: Theory of the Global Financial Crisis”: ‘The very same corporate psychopaths, who probably caused the crisis by their self-seeking greed and avarice, are now advising governments on how to get out of the crisis . . .’)

http://bit.ly/2pLvwU (Enron sociopath employees caught on tape, CBS news)

Jonty Skrufff: http://listn.to/JontySkrufff

Slap Gaddafi; click on the picture to play

Colonel Gaddafi’s right hand man Mansour Dhao Ibrahim spoke to the Guardian this week about the Libyan dictator’s final moments and revealed Gaddafi was ‘angry and disappointed’ as the rebel forces closed n.

“He thought his people should love him until the end. He felt he had done so many good things for them and for Libya,” said Ibrahim, “He also felt betrayed by men who had seemed to be his friends, like Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi.” (BBC: http://bbc.in/uJxMxx )

Details of Gaddafi’s disappointment came as the Guardian published an in-depth report on the rise of alternative new political parties disillusioned with mainstream politicians, including the Pirate Party and Hungary’s Lehet Más a Politika (LMP), Politics Can Be Different.

LMP won 16 seats in Hungary last year, which party leader Virag Kaufer, 36, said resulted from citizens being ‘tired of the arrogance and ignorance of the political elites and their inability to change the current situation’.

“All over Europe there is the same disillusionment with the political elite. You can see this with the Occupy Movement in Wall Street and elsewhere,” she suggested.

“People are demanding to be listened to, especially young people. They have nothing to lose – unemployment hasn’t been this bad for a long time,” she added. (Guardian; http://bit.ly/vDulQZ )

Meanwhile In America, legendary journalist Bill Moyers labeled US politicians as gangsters in a speech delivered for consumer group Public Citizen this week.

“Barack Obama criticizes bankers as “fat cats”, then invites them to dine at a pricey New York restaurant where the tasting menu runs to $195 a person. That’s now the norm, and they get away with it,” said Mr Moyers.

“The President has raised more money from banks, hedge funds, and private equity managers than any Republican candidate, including Mitt Romney. Inch by inch he has conceded ground to them while espousing populist rhetoric that his very actions betray.

Let’s name this for what it is: Democratic deviancy defined further downward. Our politicians are little more than money launderers in the trafficking of power and policy – fewer than six degrees of separation from the spirit and tactics of Tony Soprano,” he claimed. (Alternet: http://bit.ly/tT3gfp )

Jonty Skrufff: http://listn.to/JontySkrufff