One thing that Hedge Funds, Home Owners and Nick Leeson have in common is the Gambling Business. All three are in it. Nick Leeson never wanted to be. He started off in Arbitrage. But the deeper he got…betting on the rise in the Japanese Yen…the fewer his options. After the Kobe Earthquake, Double or Quits was the only chance left.

Few English Home Owners know they are speculating on Property Prices. Even fewer understand they can place their Property Bets without buying a house. The banks and their mortgage mis-sellers are understandably reluctant to enlighten them about Property Funds…gains without gutters…as this would scupper their Equity Release ‘n Asset Grabbing Scam. Never mind! Poor dears! They know not what they do.

These three sets of gamblers have something else in common…location, location, location. Nick Leeson hailed from a Grammar School in Watford…a 30-minute train ride north of London while most of Europe’s Property Speculators come from the South-east of England. It was the London-based Barings Bank that led the charge into Bet Hedging 200 years ago by buying Louisiana from Napoleon on Jefferson’s account. Leeson is in the Barings Tradition.

Eurohedge…the industry’s PR-arm…reckons there are now 1200 Hedge Funds feeding the Market Frenzy…with four out of five of them managed from the UK which means the City of London’s Square Mile or Edinburgh’s Golden Mile. These Hedge Funds have surged ahead in the past two years from $280 billion of assets under mismanagement at the start of 2005 to $325 billion a year later and spilling over the $400 billion mark by the middle of 2006.

According to Eurohedge there is a hundred billion dollars-worth of assets…$ 100 000 000 000…overhanging the World Markets from the Top Ten London Hedge Funds…two thirds controlled by the Big Five of Man Group/AHL ($16 billion); GLG ($15b); Blue Crest ($13b); Breven Howard ($11b) and Lansdowne ($10b). The second tier includes Sloane Robinson, Cheyne, BlueBay, Marshall Wace and the Children’s Investment Fund.

The mighty Goldman Sachs has a $10 billion in-house Hedge Fund…the Global Alpha Fund…running out of New York. The fund was looking just dandy in mid-summer…up 9% and on track for another year with 25% annual returns. But in August this year they lost the plot. By the end of the month the fund was back where it started having lost a year’s gains in one month.

A spokesperson was quoted as saying: ‘Global Alpha expects to record a sharp decline every 20 months.’ Hmm! Global Alpha is one of dozens of hedge funds that follow the macro-strategy that earned George Soros infamy as the man who broke the Bank of England when he bet against the pound.

These enormous aggregations of Private Capital make big picture punts on the World Economy with currencies, equities, bonds and derivatives…and then hide their windfall profits away in Offshore Tax Havens. That at least is the theory. But in practice these are Insider Trading Funds…and they can go horribly wrong when a Dead Cert turns out to be a Set-Up or the horse being backed gets nobbled.

For instance it looks like JPMorganChase have been betting the farm on Gibson’s Paradox that under a fixed gold price regime real interest rates remain predictable. Just before 9/11 a report from Adam Hamilton entitled The Derivatives Monster flagged up the fact that JPMorganChase held title to two-thirds of the Interest Rate Derivatives Market…worth the notional amount of $ 17 700 billion (£17 700 000 000 000) and twenty times the size of the London Hedge Funds. This only made sense if they had inside knowledge of a Gold Price Fixing.

My Andy Capp Strategy has me updating my CV, sending it to the ten biggest London Hedge Funds and threatening to sue them under the new Age Discrimination Legislation…came in force this week…if they refused me a job or some other way to use my talents at a few hundred pounds an hour.

As Hedge Funding will soon be going the way of Tulips and DotComs they would be smart to enlist me. The warning signs are there. Eurohedge reports that institutional investors like pension funds are replacing rich individuals as the main source of new money. That’s a dead giveaway. These funds are high leverage as well as high risk. Bets can be lost as well as won…ask Nick Leeson.

On 11th September 2003 the front-page story in the Daily Telegraph included this eye-witness account from Hanna Sundberg: ‘Anna Lindh lay on the floor and it looked as if a tall man wearing a peaked cap was hitting her. When he ran away he threw away a knife. As blood streamed on to the floor she cried out: ‘God, he has stabbed me in the stomach’. Strangely the official version of events had the murder weapon turning up at a subway station.

The Telegraph linked the attack to the Swedish Euro Referendum three days later. ‘It has echoes of last year’s murder of Pim Fortuyn…the Dutch populist leader…shot dead in the first political assassination in the Netherlands for 400 years and points to a further coarsening of European politics. Mrs Lindh was the one politician with the charisma to save the floundering Yes Campaign. It is eleven points behind in the polls despite the biggest spending campaign in Swedish history and the support of all the big guns of the political establishment.’

But this story was written by journalists. Sweden’s Diplomats and Civil Servants knew better. The Swedish Government were aware that after outspending the Keep Our Swedish Krona Campaign by six to one and still being 50 to 39 behind in the opinion polls the probability of the Yes Campaign losing spectacularly was rapidly becoming a certainty.

Urgent Crisis Planning would have been underway. A sharp reaction from Brussels could be expected…including the rapid deployment of Central and Private Banks to orchestrate a run on the Swedish Krona. A Defence Plan against this run on the currency…and its consequences…would have been Number One Priority.

As Sweden’s Foreign Secretary the diplomatic task would have fallen to Anna Lindh. The first line of defence for the Swedish Currency would be Norway with her oil-backed currency, Denmark with her Euro Opt-Out and Göran Persson’s Third Way colleagues and fellow Opter-Outers…Blair, Brown and their UK New Labour Government.

The Texans and the Neo-Cons in the Court of King George might also have been potential allies. Nothing threatened US Dollar Hegemony more than the rise of the Euro as an alternative Oil Currency. Indeed it would have made sense for the CIA to pour secret funds into the Swedish No to the Euro Campaign.

But here Anna Lindh had a problem. Within the Social Democrat Government she had been arguing for Sweden to join France and Germany in outright opposition to the Iraq War. Her stance on the war was no secret. Lindh referred to Bush as ‘the lone ranger’.

Anna Lindh died on the morning of Thursday 11th September 2003 from complications after her nine-hour operation. The European Commissioner for External Relations Chris Patten called Anna Lindh ‘a brave and talented politician’. Brave? Were threats made to her and her family? From whom?

Anna Lindh had thrown herself into the Euro Referendum in the weeks before her murder. As one of the most popular politicians in Sweden she fronted the Pro-Euro Campaign. Her face was on billboards all over Sweden. Following her killing all Euro Campaign Events were cancelled, Television Campaign Commercials withdrawn, Campaign Billboard Advertising removed and Print Media Advertising cancelled. To Swedes Anna Lindh’s assassination was a direct attack on Sweden’s Open Society.

Top politicians learn to be good actors. But no one doubted that Prime Minister Göran Persson’s sense of loss was heart-felt and his tears genuine. Indeed his quiet dignity endeared him to the whole nation. The idea that the Swedish Government or the Social Democratic Party might have played any part in an Assassination Conspiracy is remote.

But the juxtaposition of the assassination of Anna Lindh with the American Neoconservative’s Second Anniversary of 9/11 and the European Union’s certain defeat in the Swedish Euro Referendum remains worrying.

The view of some Conspiracy Theorists is of a psychological miscalculation of massive proportions. The plotters assumed Swedes would be cowered into a Sympathy Vote that would sweep the Yes Campaign to victory. Many Swedes feared this outcome…and the No Campaign started preparing to cry foul. There are precedents for such miscalculations.

In the 1940s the Nazis believed their bombing of English cities would bring the country to its knees but it had the opposite effect. And on Crete, Nazi Reprisals galvanised the Greeks and cost the German Army dear.

Swedes saw a connection between Anna Lindh’s killing and the Euro Referendum. But the nation’s psychological reaction went the opposite way…indeed with hindsight the Yes Campaign may have grounds for demanding a new referendum. Swedes refused to be blackmailed and turned out in force to give a resounding landslide victory to the No Campaign.

My e-mail exchange with Boudewijn on the day of Anna Lindh’s death expresses my own outrage. ‘Jeez...do we live in evil times when hundreds (thousands?) of people earning hundreds of thousands of dollars of salaries sit around at desks in their grey suits and write memos and draw up plans to kill off the good guys...Robert Kennedy...Olof Palme...Petra Kelly...and now Anna Lindh.'

'We should get hold of their kids and talk to them about what Daddy does when he goes to work. They'd be appalled...even if their wives are happy to turn the other way as long as the salary comes in and the mortgage gets paid. Private Eye’s front page cartoon took this tack.

Alistair Campbell is sitting with his son and the boy asks: 'Daddy, What Did You Do In The War?' Daddy Alistair answers: 'I started it, son!'