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(Blythe) Masters of the Universe

(Blythe) Masters of the Universe published on

In the recent headlong rush to blame all the world’s financial woes on the evil that is maleness, one interesting fact has been lost in the hubbub – It’s mostly the fault of a woman called Blythe Masters.

Masters, who hails from the same clod of soil as Harriet Harman, is apparently an even greater monster, having been the creatrix of a thingy called Credit Default Swaps, a weird financial thingamajig which was once referred to by Warren Buffet as a financial weapon of mass destruction, and which is apparently the main cause of all these woes. As you may have gleaned by now i am not exactly a financial wizard,  so don’t be askin’ me for an explanation as to how all this works – the writer of the article linked below tries to explain it and gets some positive comments on said explanation, but I personally didn’t get it! Perhaps not surprising given that when in high school the only subject I ever sucked at was math…

Blythe Masters learnt how to sew body parts together at Cambridge University, and got her lab, electricity supply and a hunchbacked personal assistant named Igor from those great humanitarians at JP Morgan. Masters was also once quoted as saying that her fiduciary nonesuch was the equivalent of  “a free lunch,”  something which of course, unless you are a food critic, simply doesn’t exist.

When called out by The Guardian on her creation’s destructive effects on the economy, our female Frankenstein replied blithely (sorry, but I couldn’t resist)…

“I do believe CDSs [credit default swaps] have been miscast, much as poor workmen tend to blame their tools.”

Which I take it is the business equivalent of “Credit Default Swaps don’t kill people, people with Credit Default Swaps kill people.”

More here.

Thanks to pjanus for the heads up on this enlightening article.