"A kind of 007 license to do whatever we want".

One imagines that the billionaire hedge-fund manager Louis Bacon may have had second thoughts about the wisdom of his contemptuous and remarkably frank boast made earlier this year, that in terms of 'global macro' finance his firm Moore Capital Management had been given "a kind of 007 license to do whatever we want". Quite so, Mr. Bacon. This was clearly no idle boast. The 007 'license to kill' has been put to effective use by MCM in the financial world. While there are many complex factors behind the appalling financial mess there is not the slightest doubt that Bacon et al. has had a major part to play, and apparently he continues to do very well out of it.

This is not a matter of speculation. In the same interview where Bacon spoke of the occasions where he had made the most money through speculation he also referred proudly, and one might almost say, shamelesly, to the subprime market where, 'we made absolute money...we made a ton of money". With the knowledge that there are millions of homeless and bankupt Americans now ruined by the subprime scandal this is hardly the sort of admission one would expect from the notoriously secret Bacon. Still less so when one contemplates that the subprime housing scam was perhaps, the most significant trigger in bringing about the present world crisis.

It is precisely because of Congressional concern about hedge fund managers doing 'whatever they want' that five of the more prominent billionaires, who have profited by their speculation, were last week called to account for their part in the collapse of the global financial system. Unfortunately, Louis Bacon was not one of these and therefore did not have to explain his 007 remark, not his involvement in subprime. George Soros, the hedge-funder who famously is said to have been the man who 'broke the Bank of England' was however, one of the quintet. Needless to say all five washed their hands of any real responsibility for the crisis but Soros, who has previously, and not without an element of hypocracy, warned about the dangerous excesses of hedge fund trading, admitted that such speculation in funds had been a major part of pricking the financial market bubble. Interestingly, insiders within Bacon's group confide that Bacon was furious with Soros' previous warnings about hedge funds, describing him as a 'traitor'.

One suspects that the 007 reference may be a little more revealing than Mr. Bacon intended. Certainly, the astonishing wealth accumulated through inflicting misfortune on American homeowners and others, has enabled Mr. Bacon to pursue a fantasy common to the schoolboy mentality. Apart from the well known obsession with secrecy, insiders report a fascination with the obvious Bond-like accroutements as a Global Express private jet, a Magnum boat loaded with Uzi machine pistols, and cocaine-fuelled parties attended by minor royalty and expensive call girls. Of course, all this is de rigeur for many billionaires but the purchase of islands, the secret dabbling in art, the reported use of electronic sweeping devices and an apparent propensity for exacting revenge for slights, real or imagined, indicates that there is more than a touch of Goldfinger about Mr. Bacon.

Indeed, we may be permitted to wonder the precise role which Mr. Bacon adopts in his mind as he creates his own Casino Royale. In a recent interview with George Soros, the British writer Alaine de Botton was told by Soros that "Money gives you power and that gives you freedom - and that's what I enjoy". To which de Botton wryly replied, "We are lucky that you are not an evil man". Let us hope that whatever fantasy was revealed by Louis Bacon's Freudian slip of the tongue, it was not of the Dr. No variety.