“Manek: How I beat everyone during volatile summer”
- Headline in ‘Investment Week’ extolling the performance of Jayesh Manek’s ‘Manek Growth Fund’, which has so far lost 23.6% during 2011.
This is, at heart, a tale of one tragedy, or two films. Roy Ward Baker’s 1958 classic ‘A Night To Remember’ is a simple, heartbreaking gem – an account of the sinking of the Titanic, clearly told, putting on display the culture and ethics of at least one bygone age (1958 and 1912). And it has Kenneth More, who at least in cinematic terms is surely the finest Englishman who ever lived. James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster is also a product of its time – gaudy but empty spectacle, grotesquely overbudgeted and even more bafflingly materially successful. And it has Leonardo DiCaprio, the fey, cat-faced boy who is almost crushed beneath Kate Winslet in a grotesquely shot coupling sequence devoid of any hint of romanticism. But the Titanic story also happens to be the perfect encapsulation of our ongoing financial crisis; as The Onion put it, in perhaps its finest ever satirical headline, “WORLD’S LARGEST METAPHOR HITS ICE-BERG”. The “unsinkable” triumph of hubristic faith in (financial) engineering over the natural world sets sail on its maiden voyage buoyed up by mass overconfidence, hits the maritime equivalent of a black swan, and a lot of people end up underwater. A few rich folk get soaked in the process, but it is the lower orders (and the Irish !) that really get stiffed. Plus ça change..
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