Rent a great big hall somewhere. Pour in neurotic barrow-boys, moribund investors and sleazy slickers. Take a large knob of half-baked information, and add – agitating the suspension until fully blended, thick and sloppy. Leave to rest upon thin air. Watch as it splatters to the floor. Wait 12-24 hours and then extract money at will. In case of failure to cook up the mixture properly, take cellar of taxpayers, turn upside down, and shake vigorously. Repeat as necessary.

I mentioned yesterday about ‘smart’ money buying into the FTSE briefly. Even after the shocks from Germany during the day, the level held up quite well. And there were some very big trades. I thought it ‘smart’ money, because it was a calculated gamble on the BundersCourt giving the go-ahead to further Merkelian bailouts; and sure enough, on this morning’s totally unsurprising news from Berlin, sucker money has piled into the FTSE….jacking it up by nearly 2.5% this morning so far. Those who bought yesterday will probably clear an average profit of at least 1.5 – 2% – nice work if you can get it – assuming they sell, say, late this afternoon

However, I’d hate any Slogger to extrapolate from the word ‘smart’ that I approve of it. It puts me in mind of the old Peter Cook police chief interview sketch, where his character Inspector Streeb-Greebling is asked, in relation to an event, “So you think thieves are responsible?” “Certainly not,” Cook replies, “I think thieves are entirely irresponsible”. Those who ‘use’ the market in this way are, and always will be, leeches on the socio-economic body. I’ve heard all the arguments about value for money for clients and helping pensioners and all the rest of the excuses, but it’s a fatuous rationale: this sort of speculation makes a few people even richer than they already are, and rogers everyone else.

On a broader canvas, we should also give careful thought to the German Constitutional Court’s action. Everyone I emailed or spoke to yesterday assumed the Court would bow to economic pressure: “How could they not?” said one lady, in a tone suggesting I was deranged to even ask. The answer, of course, is because it shouldn’t bow to any pressure: it’s a Supreme Court – that’s the point. ‘Get real’ I can hear you all thinking; but suppose the issue had been Angela Merkel demanding a State of Emergency because, without giving Greece 300 billion euros immediately, four major banks would fall? That would be just as illegal as the, um, bailouts have been. It is a slippery slope….and one that has featured large in German history. (In case you hadn’t spotted it, by the way, the Court gave a very negative judgement on the eurobond idea. Now then, I wonder how on earth that got in there?)

But back in the moral maze of finance, those greedily buying in again now will have only themselves to blame when they eventually lose on the deal: the BundesCourt verdict  is completely irrelevant, because the die has already been cast. The markets have publicly deserted Greece for good and all, and the German Chancellor (under severe pressure from her CDU colleagues) is, short of a miracle, resigned to the Athen’s Government drowning again very soon, as the Everest of debt lands hard on the fragile gull’s-egg of asset ‘sales’.

These represent only a few of the obvious flaws in the bourse system of business finance. Based on emotions like fear and greed anyway, they are increasingly easily manipulated these days by crooks whose actions are untraceable: and most speculation isn’t speculation at all – it’s ‘directionalizing’, that awful American word meaning the creation of an artificial trend in order to sucker others. It surprises many people when they’re told that, in most if its forms, it is illegal. But that line became too blurred on these and other matters long ago.

As of 10.15 am BST, I note that the FTSE appears to have leveled off at around 5300. Last night, Greek finance minister Evangelos Venizelos told the assembled media, “We are in the middle of a peculiar war — if we lose, we lose everything. If we don’t complete structural reforms, if we don’t change the way the state and the economy work, we will be stuck.” It’s what he thinks Greece will be stuck with that nobody in their right mind can fathom. If Athens defaults tomorrow without selling any assets, is the Wehrmacht going to invade?

Venizelos can sound as very zealous as he likes: he is not in a war – peculiar or otherwise – he is part of a poker game in which everyone has a lousy hand, and there’s nothing in the pot for anyone except banks and other assorted sovereign lenders. Sure, I know these people represent pensions and so on; but what on earth were they doing lending billions to Ricky Retsina’s Kebab & Kalamari Bar in the first place?

Taken as a whole, the eurozone debt crisis represents the most extraordinary sting in history. Probably no more than 15,000 individuals with dicks where their judgement should be want a currency zone of 320 million citizens to pay in full for past errors of near unbelievable stupidity. They want the vast majority of this money to be extracted – without any rationale at all – from the taxation take of those 320 million Europeans who already paid so it could be wasted on pointless delay of the inevitable…again, purely for the banks. And if they don’t get enough from that, they want all the airports, roads and hospitals as well. Danish banks – from a Nordic paradise already the richest per capita country on Earth – want them to sell the assets twice, just so they can get in on the act. I’d love to write ‘We will never see the like of this again’. But we  will, oh yes – we will.