This is still my stuff.

This is a shortened version of an article in the print edition of Rolling Stone #1075 which I happened, unusually, to pick up on Friday night. I'm glad I did; in conjunction with a piece in the otherwise fairly uninspiring new UK Wired about banks using David Li's 'copula' formula to correlate risk, it lends a much clearer understanding of the current situation, and it isn't pretty. From the declawing of Glass-Steagall, through the creation of ever-more complex derivative instruments to the eventual rejection of Congressional audit by the Federal Reserve under an obscure 1950 statute, the road to takeover by bankers of regulators and the Fed has been signposted, if only we'd known how to read the signs - or even that those strange daubs consituted signs. A companion analysis of the UK landscape would be, how you say ... fascinating.