An Englishman in New York: Alessio Rastani on the Global Democratic Deficit

When Alessio Rastani first burst into global consciousness on 26th September 2011 following an instant classic of an interview on the normally moribund BBC News channel, he was variously dismissed as a plant, a comedian or a fake by the more credulous sections of the British mass media who seemed to be in collective denial over the influence that certain elements of the financial industry exert over key political and regulatory actors. Yet we at Mediolana knew that the iconic independent trader – a category of professional that trades their own money, rather than resorting to institutionalised gambling of the general population’s assets – was very much the real deal: a rare percipient voice in a sea of hypocritical verbiage; someone to take very seriously indeed.

And the international media agreed with us. Appearances on CNN and Al Jazeera merely reaffirmed Rastani’s credentials as an opinion-maker of genuine import; his detailed evaluations of the overall health and stability of the global financial system are – unlike the actions of the plutocratic classes in much of the developed world – likely to be judged favourably by historians.

Yet as an interview with New York’s global youth culture bible Elan Magazine amply demonstrates, the Italo-Iranian’s insights are not confined to all matters financial. Riffing effortlessly on subjects from the flaws in the world’s financial architecture to the necessity for intellectual investment by traders and citizens more generally, Rastani signed off with a sobering observation that will give the world of political science something to think about: ‘I really doubt…that any true democracy exists in the world we live…a lot of the protests [such as Occupy Wall Street] are just about frustration with the system as it is right now. It’s not just about banks and bonuses. It’s about the fact that nothing really is changing. No matter who will elect, no matter who we put in power, it’s the same old stuff.’

This gave us pause for thought. It has been observed – not least by Francis Fukuyama, author of the seminal The End of History and the Last Man – that the world as a whole has been heading towards a consensus that democracy is the best form of governance; as the novelist and filmmaker Charles Michel Duke has observed, rare today is the newly-independent state that decides to be a monarchy rather than a republic.

Yet as superior as democracy may be to the alternatives, no human system is perfect. The best laws can be abrogated or ignored, public servants can be subject to regulatory capture, spurious states of emergency can be engendered and technology can make a mockery of equity. The health of even the best-designed system is to a large degree contingent on the ethics of the people who populate it: no form of governance can legislate for morality. And as Rastani notes in his recent article Are Traders Greedy Psychopaths?, cultures do not arise from nowhere: they are created and sustained by populations. If our system of governance is dysfunctional, it may say much more about ourselves than we are willing to admit.

BBC Three’s Most Annoying People: Miscasting Alessio Rastani, Again

From time to time within a given milieu, one person or phenomenon has the ability to show up a culture for its vacuity, mendacity and poverty, and it would harder at this moment in time to find anyone who fits that description – at least within the United Kingdom – than Alessio Rastani. Since being justly catapulted to stardom as a result of his now world-famous 26th September 2011 interview on the BBC News Channel, Rastani’s analysis on what is transforming from a global financial crisis to a global financial meltdown has been sought by – amongst others – CNN, RTÉ and Al Jazeera English. However, the reception given to him in the UK media has been generally hostile, with ITV in particular guilty of an asinine attempted character assassination when a little rational analysis was called for.

Yet even the mindless abuse heaped upon Rastani on ITV1′s Adrian Chiles-hosted That Sunday Night Show is not, it seems, enough: presumably as part of its ‘seasonal’ programming, BBC Three is featuring the Italo-Iranian as part of a 90 minute tabloid-style special ominously entitled Most Annoying People, which purports to list the 50 people who have ‘vexed’ the Great British Public during this Year of Our Lord 2011. Even as an exercise in cheap, filler television it is a waste of space – the total capitulation to some of the baser manifestations of celebrity is manifested here on a scale that might even make some of the smaller digital channels dotting the UK’s broadcasting landscape retch – but the inclusion of Rastani as the forty-fifth most annoying person of 2011 is tasteless, and worrying, in the extreme.

In the programme, the director of Santoro Projects Limited is painted – not again! – as an ‘”evil” “banker”‘ who (we are never told how) is somehow worthy of pointing a finger at simply because he told presenter Martine Croxall that the eurozone crisis was something to which there may be no conventional solution, and that the New York-based investment bank Goldman Sachs enjoys vastly disproportionate influence. Yet the parade of nonentities lined up to poke fun at Rastani could come up with nothing more substantive than a comment on the coral pink tie that the person who is now surely the planet’s most famous independent trader was sporting that morning.

All too predictably, Rastani’s most salient point – that the general public should get prepared, and protect whatever assets they have from an impending financial tsunami – was not even noted. And so viewers in the UK – in between cheerfully scuffling over designer handbags and booking next summer’s holidays – are liberated to get annoyed at one of the select few commentators who has repeatedly warned them that their economy is on the precipice; those that actually engendered this crisis, of course, are spared our disapproval.

Alessio Rastani on 2012: ‘The System as we Know it is Going to Collapse’

It’s difficult for most people to recollect an era when the future seemed to be so uncertain, but whatever happens in as yet unelapsed time, we at Mediolana cannot be accused of ignoring the phenomenon that is Alessio Rastani, director of the London-based company Santoro Projects Limited who was catapulted to global stardom this autumn via an instant classic of a BBC News interview. Rastani – who has since featured more times on national and international television than even we can chronicle – is looking increasingly visionary; his observation that ‘governments don’t rule the world: Goldman Sachs rules the world’ has taken on the status of life imitating art as ‘Super Mario’ Monti and Lucas Papademos – both heavily connected with the investment banking and securities behemoth of 200 West Street in New York City – are now respectively in charge of troubled eurozone economies Italy and Greece.

This past Saturday, Rastani outlined a new dimension to his thought at the Bank of Ideas (‘BAI’), an impromptu educational facility that was only inaugurated on 19th November 2011; the BAI is located in an abandoned UBS AG building on the fringes of the City of London. Rastani’s main talk was, as usual, perceptive and honest. He pulled no punches in telling his audience that Wall Street would always defeat them as long as it could manipulate the general public’s ignorance of all matters financial and play on human irrationality; meanwhile, Rastani’s exhortation that people should stop wasting their lives obsessing over reality television shows and soap operas was a call that is as salient as it is unlikely to be heeded, at least in the short-term.

Yet the truly striking – and troubling – development in Rastani’s burgeoning theoretical corpus was articulated not so much during his talk, but whilst waiting to enter the building at Sun Street, Hackney: chatting to some fans, Caffè Nero cup in hand, the amiable Italo-Iranian noted that the state of play in the financial markets ‘is a lot worse than people can actually imagine’, and that soon – perhaps as soon as January, 2012 – ‘people are going to have to realise that the entire system as we know it is going to collapse‘.

This particular strand of Rastani’s thought is disturbing, but not because we think that one of the world’s most famous independent traders is incorrect on this count; quite the reverse is in fact the case, and it is this that perplexes us. During his main talk, Rastani cited the example of MF Global (‘MFG’), a financial services provider that is now in the death spiral of Chapter 11 bankruptcy and liquidation. Facing the inevitable fallout from gigantic bad bets made on European sovereign debt, it appears that MFG heisted hundreds of millions – perhaps billions – of dollars from customer accounts. But, incredibly, these same customers are facing serious obstacles to legal redress, with the judge in their case at the Manhattan Bankruptcy Court refusing their request to form a committee to represent them while, at the same time, ex-MFG CEO Jon Corzine – the man who oversaw this fiscal and ethical meltdown – walks free. As Rastani warns us, this is a sobering precedent – and one the general population would do well to contemplate.

Mediolana: All Alessio, All the Time

It started off in that most random of ways, one made possible only by the early twenty-first century phenomenon that is social networking: we happened to see a remarkable clip on a Facebook page belonging to no less than the CEO of one of our favourite companies, digital marketing agency Azam Marketing; the video featured a highly personable, impeccably groomed independent trader. Unlike most other financial ‘experts’ trundled into a television studio for the purpose of talking up a share price or spewing invective dressed up as jargon, this trader looked straight into the camera and described the world as he saw it, with no pretensions or corporate agenda in sight. On the contrary, he evinced a highly unusual characteristic in today’s financial services world: altruism. He devoted precious seconds of a BBC News interview not to meaningless conjecture about the minutiae of a potential market response to yet another rescue package, but instead to delivering a stark warning to the watching public: protect your existing assets and get prepared for a period of fiscal turbulence unlike any other.

Less than a month after that fateful late September interview, it seems safe to conclude that Alessio Rastani has taken the fast track to being a voice of global significance. ITV, RTÉ, CNN, Al Jazeera English and even Infowars.com have hosted the commentator who may prove to be one of the most prescient of our times. Inundated with offers from countless major media organs and with tens of thousands of followers on Twitter and Facebook, one would expect Rastani to be swept up in the cult of celebrity faster than one can purchase a trashy, lurid, barely full-colour magazine replete with low-resolution pictures of what pass for cultural idols.

@Mediolana Hey Asad – thank you for your wonderful blogs and posts!! Cheers. Al—
Alessio Rastani (@alessiorastani) October 22, 2011

Yet instead, we find that Rastani – the ‘rogue trader’ that shook the world – has the presence of mind to check out mediolana.wordpress.com and send us a message of appreciation; not only that, but he retweeted our blog post analysing his recent appearance on Al Jazeera’s Inside Story. Like Cimo Röcker before him, Alessio Rastani is climbing all the way to the top, but eschewing the celebrity ethic in doing so; like Cimo, Alessio’s future appears to promise boundless possibilities.

@alessiorastani Re: yr appearance on #AJE – Alessio Rastani on Inside Story: Confirmation of a Cultural Phenomenon wp.me/p1gLB2-sX #ows—
Asad Yawar (@Mediolana) October 18, 2011

Alessio Rastani on Inside Story: Confirmation of a Cultural Phenomenon

As our regular readers will doubtless be aware, we at Mediolana have been following the astronomical rise in the stock of Alessio Rastani – director of London-based company Santoro Projects Limited – since his landmark appearance on BBC News; on a quiet morning in late September, punctuated only by the sound of shuffling papers as the eurozone countries attempted to thrash out yet another rescue package, the shattering of the opaque pane that separated the financial markets from the ordinary citizen was a cultural moment that those who witnessed it will never forget.

Having stunned those inhabiting the cosy bubble of the more unquestioning elements of the mass media, Rastani has taken the world by storm: appearances on CNN, ITV, RTÉ One, Infowars.com and, perhaps most prestigiously, fabled broadcaster Sir David Frost’s Frost Over the World show have followed. On all of these shows, the Italo-Iranian has been a paradigm of cool, despite being subject to emetic provocations by a panel in denial on That Sunday Night Show (ITV), and being accused of merely ‘having a book to sell’ on CNN; moreover, he has been steadily expounding on the content of his BBC interview, minting new quotations and confirming that his is a voice to be respected.

However, viewers of Rastani’s most recent television appearance – his second on Al Jazeera English, this time as part of an Inside Story discussion on the Occupy Wall Street (‘OWS’) movement, with his counterpart being OWS organiser Mark Bray – saw him take matters to another level. Given a considerate and fair-minded host in the form of much-decorated journalist Mike Hanna – who, like Sir David Frost, showed Rastani a basic level of respect that has been all-too-lacking on some other channels – the man who is arguably the world’s most famous independent share trader illuminated a number of topics in a way that few have managed before:

1. America’s Democratic Deficit. Rastani demolished the traditional left-right political continuum, positing that regardless of whom the American electorate vote for, the resulting administration do not answer to them, but instead to powerful forces from the world of finance; this phenomenon is not unique to the United States.

2. Capitalism Versus Corruption. Unlike so many analysts – particularly, though perhaps not exclusively, those on the left of the ideological spectrum – Rastani eschewed lazy critiques of capitalism, pointing instead to the need for a market economy which was not defined by corruption and irresponsibility.

3. Millenial Mania. Rastani cited – with great perspicacity - the Information Technology Bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s as being a watershed for the financial sector, which was captivated by the amount, and the sheer velocity, of money that the bubble illustrated could be enticed out of investors; this, in turn, led to banks casting aside most of the traditional self-imposed lending restraints, with devastating consequences.

4. Get Prepared. Having issued a stark warning to the global public on his BBC interview – protect your assets, don’t rely on your governments for solutions and batten down the hatches for a financial tsunami, one possibly involving the disappearance of the savings of millions – Rastani now addressed the major banking institutions, admonishing them that a significant number of citizens were now all-too-aware of the financial sector’s love affair with moral hazard and that protests would rock the world in the next 12 months.

5. Independent and Liberated. Rastani further polished his merited image as a rare voice of sanity, stressing that he has never worked for a City of London bank and is essentially an outsider who has penetrated the gates of finance’s fortress: ‘I never wanted to be part of the system in the first place…What kind of system is this?’

The Contentions of Alessio Rastani: the Debate Commences

As our regular readers are well aware, since this blog’s first post on 1st January 2011, mediolana.wordpress.com has enjoyed expanding traffic; first steadily, and then more spectacularly. But little could have prepared us for the phenomenal reaction to yesterday’s post on the topic of Alessio Rastani, the head honcho at the until recently little-known Santoro Projects company who has become a global sensation on the back of a gloriously frank live BBC News interview telecast earlier this week. We have literally had the scale of our graphs recalibrated as the seemingly insatiable demand for quality analysis of this extraordinary man translates into an Internet stampede of the like that is rarely witnessed.

In our post of 29th September 2011 entitled ‘Alessio Rastani: Rogue Trader or Prophet of Doom?‘, we lamented the fact that many commentators (of, we feel compelled to add, questionable financial literacy) seemed to delight in the idea that Mr. Rastani might be a hoax; alternatively, some posited that owing to his modest residential address and the fact that Santoro Projects can be categorised, with little hesitation, as an SME, Rastani should not be listened to.

From a perusal of his leadingtrader.com blog, however, two things seem to be clear. Firstly, the idea that Rastani was purely a hoax should never have gained much traction: leadingtrader.com links to Rastani’s YouTube account, which shows that he has been uploading videos relating to financial matters (as well as more personal content, such as a video clip detailing what a visitor can expect to see on landing at Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran, Iran) for around one year; his blog contains many interesting, if perhaps slightly derivative, posts on the art of trading in shares.

Secondly, the deluge of comments on his recent posts illustrates that Rastani has obviously tapped into deeply-held fears that much of the developed’s world’s population hold about the likelihood of a prolonged period of fiscal uncertainty, and for his direct, brutally honest assessment of the state of the global world economy – as well as his urging ordinary people that they should act to protect their assets from devaluation – Rastani is being hailed as a postmodern folk hero.

Indeed, we at Mediolana looked upon arguments based on little more than prejudice and poor research as a sign that many media outlets were simply unwilling or unable to tackle the London-based independent trader’s contentions, and challenged those that scoffed at Rastani’s ostensibly humble material circumstances to address the points that he made.

Finally, the requested debate appears to be commencing. BBC News has taken three days to comment analytically on an interview it originally broadcast, but at least it has now published a piece on whether Rastani’s views actually have some merit; Russia Today, meanwhile, has pointed to the fact that hysterical, knee-jerk responses to Rastani’s appearance on BBC News have, rather than any serious examination of his ideas, been the default position, in some senses echoing the words of this blog.

As the newest kid on the economic punditry block appears on CNN (above), amasses many thousands of followers on Twitter and sees his Facebook page deluged with praise from adoring fans, Alessio Rastani may well have occasion to reflect back on a week in which he pricked not a few paradigms, and in so doing shifted the media landscape in a way that until recently would have been unthinkable.

Alessio Rastani: Rogue Trader or Prophet of Doom?

Squeezed between the established CNN and the dynamic Al Jazeera, BBC News – all too often characterised by tired sets, characterless hosts and unchallenging programming – is rarely the choice of the global viewer seeking quality current affairs output. Yet in the last 48 hours or so, the channel has delivered a genuine ‘scoop’ of sorts: the definitive arrival into the pantheon of economic punditry of none other than Alessio Rastani.

Resplendent in a Bishopsgate suit and coral pink tie, Rastani stunned the watching lunchtime audience with his take on the latest proposed eurozone rescue plan. His comments can be summarised thus:

1. Markets are ruled by fear;

2. The euro is going to crash spectacularly;

3. There will be an investors’ rush towards the ‘safer’ assets of the US dollar and Treasury bonds;

4. The market is ‘toast’, with the stockmarket in particular being ‘finished’;

5. The savings of millions are in jeopardy;

6. The recession is a huge money-making opportunity for those that are prepared for it; and 

7. Goldman Sachs – as opposed to national, purportedly sovereign governments – rules the world.

Perhaps predictably, acres of coverage have ensued. Much of it has concentrated on the issue of whether Rastani is in fact a ‘prank’ or ‘hoax’ analyst; some of it has dwelled on how Rastani’s prosaic reality – accommodation in a semi-detached house in Bexleyheath, one of south-east London’s most remote and anonymous suburbs, and directorship of the presently indebted Santoro Projects company – contrasts with his Midlantic drawl, impeccable grooming and newly-acquired status as a fiscal savant.

Yet few if any in the media appear to be asking the following question: to paraphrase the legendary former tutors on the Advanced MBA programme at the Stockholm School of Economics, Jonas Ridderstråle and Kjell Nordström, what if Rastani is even 10% right?

While Mediolana would question Rastani’s contention that – at least in the medium-term – United States Treasury securities and the American dollar will be viewed as ‘safe havens’ for international capital, many of his other assertions raise vital questions about the structure of much of the present historical phase of Western (particularly Anglo-American) capitalism that do not have any easy – or certainly palatable – answers. Those commentators and journalists who are quick to deploy crude snobbery over someone’s residential address or supposed City of London credentials (whatever that means in the current context) would do well to turn their pens to some of the most profound economic questions of our time and answer Rastani’s primal scream with a measure of cogency. Until they do so, the independent trader with a first name straight out of Shakespeare could yet return to haunt them.