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Can't agree more. Look what happened to AB_Global's Martin Lukes after his Blackberry was confiscated by customs officials at Atlanta Airport.

There's got to be a financial angle in there somewhere. An apocalypse market with some underlying derivatives action for hedging strategies might do the trick.

Or in addition to hiring teams of rocket scientists, dealing firms should cast the net wider and hire pharmaceutical specialists such as those employed by Balco....

Following on from Elizabeth Lumley's post the other day - death by blogging - I'm sure there'd be a ready market for these magic bullets in the blogging community. Is there a contact number where I can find out more about Natural Athletic Nutrition? Purely for research purposes of course.

As this Aite research note confirms, the buy-side continues to rely on broker-dealers to drive innovation. The top dealers are doing their bit, and technology vendors are addressing core processes, but investment managers and hedge funds are reluctant to invest in the infrastructure. And why should they? In the absence of a regulatory big stick the buy side will continue to coast while the sell side picks up the tab for the industry-wide operational improvements that are needed to remove the bigger systemic risks from the system.

Yes, but like all good spoofs it has the ring of truth.

Westpac seems to be leading the pace among Australia's Big Four establishment banks in the deployment of social media. ZDNet Australia reports from a Gartner symposium late least year on the enlightened policies adopted by David Backley, CTO at Westpac on the use and implementation of social networks at the bank. As Backley sees it: "There is a war for talent out there. The next wave of people we hire are going to be used to this kind of technology. In two or three years time, if [these potential employees] aren't provided this technology inside the organisation, or at least a link to it from your network, that may affect their choices about who they work for."

Scotiabank would appear to be having a groundhog day experience with their implementation of Microsoft technology. Ron Shevlin's dug deep into the archives and came up with this gem. As one commentator put it, at least they've stayed on-message.

I sense a similar search for a scapegoat in the opprobrium heaped upon the ratings agencies for their role in the sub-prime debacle. Sure, they may have got it badly wrong, but then so did everybody else. As the BIS pointed out yesterday: "Some investors placed excessive reliance on credit rating agency ratings, doing minimal or no in-house due diligence on the CRT products employed." A rich example of the blind leading the blind.

The flying penguins were indeed a master-stroke - more so since it involved a co-ordinated effort between rival media organisation. UK dailies The Telegraph and Daily Mirror also ran stories on the 'discovery', and both papers' Websites featured a trailer fronted by former Monty Python Terry Jones, seemingly on location in the Antarctic.