Archegos Fallout

Charitable work, when done by grassroots volunteers, can be life enhancing for many individuals. When used by the 0.01% to launder their reputations, that’s not always the case. I’m not saying that charitable giving is prima facie evidence for wrong doing, I’m saying that when a big time investor wants to avoid close scrutiny, he tends to give money away to high-profile good causes (and political parties).

I should declare an interest, of a very dilute kind. A Chinese billionaire donated something of the order of fifteen million pounds to build a new building for my old college. Old members were assured that there was no quit pro quo involved, and I am sure that no explicit demands were made. But I imagine that tutors will be that bit less inclined to publicly criticize the Xi regime in future … just in case.

Bill Hwang, who ran the fund that below up on Friday, also co-founded the Grace and Mercy Foundation.

His charity *purchased* swap losses and offshore trusts from his fund. pic.twitter.com/dBlbHRK3aP

— Edwin Dorsey (@StockJabber) March 28, 2021

Is the UK a corrupt place?

A lot of people think so. I don’t have any first hand evidence, but the extreme foot dragging over enforcing ID checks for UK company directors, and the ability to create English and Scottish LLPs with partners/directors who are exclusively overseas corporate entities, with no restriction on where those entities are registered seems to point in this direction. Practically every issue of Private Eye points to some obstruction or other by the government blocking transparency of beneficial ownership. If the population of Norway is OK with every individual having his tax return in the public domain, surely we can reveal who is the real owner of, for example, Chelsea Football Club.

I might have all this wrong. Maybe there are genuine reasons why the UK media lost interest in the Panama Papers so promptly. Maybe it’s perfectly fine that hardly anyone writes about the FinCEN files. But it doesn’t seem logical, when every day is a slow news day and publications, even the FT, have the time and resources to cover a TV interview of some annoying US actress who is married to a minor UK Royal. The problem is that if you start drawing attention to this, and maybe talk about Jeffrey Epstein and his links to Mossad, you sound like one of the tin foil hat brigade and then you guarantee that everyone tunes out.

We’ve recently heard a lot about how Jeremy Heywood brought Lex Greensill into 10 Downing Street to devise schemes that seemed to have no purpose other than to enrich the investors in Greensill Capital, how David Cameron stood to gain sixty million pounds from his options in that very bank, and how government loans enabled the GHG companies that were the main borrowers from Greensill. But until the collapse of Greensill happened, we heard precisely nothing about this. The same goes for Bill Hwang. A lot of people knew about what was going on. They obviously didn’t trust the establishment to protect whistleblowers.

There are a few honourable organizations which appear to escape the self-censoring of the MSM. Full Fact, fullfact.org/ is one. Transparency International (https://www.transparency.org.uk/) is another.

Wrap

US 10Y went up as high as 1.78% before returning to where it was yesterday (1.72%). That’s really all you need to know. Other markets marked time too.

Barton Wang has some very interesting ideas about the Fed and SPX options. Listen to the latest Market Huddle to find out more.