Thursday 20 May 2010

Will you be going to the FSA risk management symposium?

No, me neither.

This FSA risk management symposium will last three days, 11 - 13 July, in the year 2525. If man is still alive. No, it's this year, obviously. And I've got to stop putting snippets of song lyrics in my posts.

O Master, frisch weht der wind, der heimat zu, mein Irisch kind, wo weilest du?

Yeah, whatever. But back to the symposium. I'm a bit worried, to be honest, about the quality of the speakers: Sally Dewar, Kathryn Dick, Sir Richard Broadbent, Alan Cathcart, Jeremy Budden, and Graeme Ashley-Fenn. They are the confirmed ones. God knows who else will show up. No one interesting, I'm sure. In the old days, we would have been offered Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Agathon, Alcibiades, Aristophanes - men of substance! And where's Socrates?

They're all dead!

Listen, my child, they must be floating around on the astral plane somewhere. The point I'm making is: the FSA should have made the effort to get a decent crew in. I blame Lyndon Nelson, myself.

Oh, don't start picking on Lyndon now!

Well, he should pull his fucking finger out. I have no great love for the FSA, but I don't want to see it totally humiliated. Sure, the FSA is misguided in its persecution of insider traders, but the people there work very hard for very little reward. They deserve better than this. We deserve better than this.