The economy is not a mob of zombies that is actually going about eating peoples brains, but the downturn has been associated with some very high profile suicides. They may not be a synchronized diving of suited businessmen from skyscraper windows, but there have been a series of deaths likely related to the economy. 

On these pages we’ve seen Patrick Rocca, who put a gun to his head in his home after losing nearly £500m; German industrialist Adolf Merckle who threw himself under a train after a short position on VW ended badly; and French financier Rene-Thierry Magnon de la Villehuchet who stabbed himself after losing big with Madoff. Add to them Chicago real estate mogul Steven Good and London-based financier Kirk Stephenson and you’ve got yourself a certified cultural meme. 

Jonathan Alpert, a Manhattan psychotherapist, says: “The identity of these people is so tied into their career that when it’s gone they don’t know who they are any more. These are high achievers, high earners, ‘Alpha Male’ types who have a good education, a good career, a high standard of living and suddenly it disappears on them and they have to re-evaluate everything.”

So if you’re used to the good life, it can be impossible to leave behind. Princess Luciana Pignatelli washed down a bottle of sleeping pills with gin at the age of seventy because she had lost what she believed to be most important: her money and looks. The author of The Beautiful People’s Beauty Book told friends “I can’t face being old and poor”, after learning all of her investments were worthless.

Unfortunately the money troubles faced by the incredibly rich can end up trickling down and affecting the more average person. Last month Major William Foxton, 65, scribbled a suicide note, marched to a park bench near his home and put a pistol to his head after he lost up to £1million to the Madoff fraud. ”People think econocide is a problem on Wall Street but it is also affecting people on Main Street, ordinary families who have lost their homes, their jobs, their savings,” says Dr Leslie Seppinni.

Dr Alan Berman of the American Association of Suicidology warns of the dire econocide-filled future we may face: “If the current recession lasts as long as the experts are predicting we expect we will see something parallel to the Great Depression. During the Great Depression, suicide rose by more than 50%, to 17.5 per 100,000 of the population.”

On a side note, the 1930s had its own suicide anthem in the form of “Gloomy Sunday”, said to be responsible for hundreds of deaths. But the noughties has gone one better, and we’ve got an actual band called Econocide, playing bedroom grindcore so awful that ending it all seems like the only method of truly cleansing your ears of the sonic memory.

All of this doom, gloom and econocide talk is absolutely depressing and inflated when lumped together like this, but at the moment these cases are rare. While the billionaires’ shame at not being able to provide for their employees can easily be replicated in an average family situation, let’s hope ordinary people maintain perspective. Just don’t listen to Econocide and you should be fine.

You may remember that Porsche revealed that it owned the majority of the common stock of VW, sending the price of the rest through the roof (with VW staff cashing in their personal stakes and presumably buying really nice summer houses). This wasn’t what some hedge funds thought would happen – fair enough, considering the state of the car industry post-recession – and they lost big through short selling. One of the biggest losers was Adolf Merckle, who went on to commit suicide amid the ruins of his business empire.

Now the fact that this trade by Porsche wasn’t the only time they’ve played the markets to their advantage means that their opponents are calling them a speculator rather than a company, potentially adding weight to allegations of market manipulation, over which Porsche are already being investigated by financial watchdog Bafin.

Frankly, it sounds awfully like sour grapes from the loss-making hedge funds, though they may have the last laugh even if their legal challenges don’t amount to anything. It’s not known how heavily Porsche is leveraged over their acquisition of the VW stake, but we do know they bought the shares at €117 each. That looks favourable when you see that the current share price is nearly €250, but compare it with that of other European car companies this morning: Renault: €16.33. Peugeot: €14.68. Fiat: €4.38. As the FT notes, VW haven’t ruled out a loss for the first quarter – their own sales are faltering, Audi sales are down, Porsche too, with only Skoda proving a success over the last couple of quarters. Give them a year or so in the current climate, and that share price could easily dip below what Porsche spent.

Porsche were legally obliged to buy out Scania after the VW buyout, but that deal has gone through without a hitch – they’ve passed on the shares to VW for the same price they bought them for. What’s more worrying is having to sort out the refinancing of a €10bn loan in less than a month, which even if they manage they’ll still face major increases to their rates of interest, which they’ll pay for… how? 

According to an analyst that the FT spoke to, Porsche had €31bn in stock liabilities last summer. Considering they’re dealing in a product that people are buying a lot less of these days, they could be the next company to have overextended and overexposed themselves at just the wrong time. Still, at least they can go and look back on the good times in their new museum. I can see their CEO Wendelin Wiedeking stumbling around it at night, drunk and Kane-like, stroking an 80’s 911 before shouting incoherently about oil prices and recession…

The owner, Maria-Elisabeth Schaeffler (who rocks hairspray and shoulder pads like Dynasty never happened), is asking for state aid to bail the company out, acknowledging that she will have to tap the family’s own wealth to pay their debts. Just like the Big Three in America being scorned by Pelosi, her first request was denied and she was told to come back when she had a better business plan outlining what the company was going to do with it. They can expect to give up a large chunk of equity whatever happens, potentially handing over the control of the company entirely if state aid fails and the banks move in.

Sound familiar? It’s exactly what happened to Adolf Merckle, fellow German industrialist and former head of all sorts of things like Heidelberg Cement, before he lost big. He was having to front his own personal wealth as collateral against loans after a short sell in VW shares went badly wrong, and went on to ask his local state government for aid to save his companies. His bid didn’t work, he saw his company being taken on by banks and equity dribble away to nothing, prompting him to take his own life.

So what went wrong for Schaeffler? Rather than a stock gamble, they took an equally big risk in making a highly leveraged acquisition at the peak of the market. As RBS, Baugur and many others now realise, this wasn’t wise. Schaeffler took on a minority stake of tyre makers Continental last summer, originally agreeing for a 49.9% stake to be built up over a few years. But then Lehman Brothers collapsed, the world went mental, and Continental’s investors decided that they’d accept Schaeffler’s earlier asking price of around €70 per share. OK, so Schaeffler were getting shares for cheaper than they had been, but the price was dropping all the time, and we were clearly entering a recession – what were they thinking? They ended up acquiring 90.2% of the shares; Continental’s share price has fallen ever since the first buyout at €75 per share – it now stands at €15.48 after going as low as €13. Schaeffler’s stake has lost €8bn in value since the buyout.

All this was funded with debt, and they also took on Continental’s debts that were amassed buying out Siemens’ VDO unit. Now no-one’s buying cars anymore, it all looks very, very bleak. At least, as the FT notes, lower raw material prices coupled with a greater demand for replacement tyres might help them out. Maybe Maria should cut out that article and frame it on her wall to gaze at while the vultures circle…

Of course this pales next to the dad of Ponzi schemes, Bernard Madoff, but it’s still a good effort from the 76-year-old. He gets bonus points for generating an old-fashioned FBI chase, after he left a suicide note, but didn’t kill himself and instead set off for the airport. Foolishly he used his mobile before he left, and left his car at the airport too. Schoolboy stuff really, I give him five more days.

There’s so much shame, deception and general epic failing going on these days that this blog just writes itself. Who else have we got this week? There’s Rod Cameron Stringer, another hedge-fund fraudster nailed by the SEC this week. He wasn’t approved by them, didn’t have a licence, is a used-car salesman, and claimed he provided returns of 61%, so if you invested with him you frankly deserve to get scammed. Oh, but wait, his investors were “mainly elderly”. Stringer exploited the trust of old people to build “a pool for his office”. They’re renovating an entire wing of the sixth layer of hell just for Stringer as we speak.

Also this week there’s Patrick Rocca, who unlike Nadel actually did kill himself, adding to Merckle and Villehuchet’s post-crisis suicide meme. Rocca is an Irish property investor and developer, who owns buildings occupied by the likes of Argos and Norwich Union. He’s believed to have lost big with Anglo-Irish Bank getting nationalised last week. But he had a Jet Ranger helicopter to run away with! Arthur Nadel could have bought a good few months fugitive status with that thing.

And in Madoff updates, we’ve got a British Virgin Islands hedge fund saying they’ve lost $350m with Madoff (sorry, but tax exiles get zero sympathy chez Bad Idea), and there’s also his business associate Robert Jaffe, who yesterday refused to answer the subpoena issued to him to outline his involvement with Madoff. He received one or two percent on transactions he fed to Madoff, but for his part he claims that he didn’t know anything about Madoff’s shadiness, and his family, including Carl Shapiro, have been some of the biggest losers. Jaffe has already had to face some wrath, when he went to a party full of people who lost money with Madoff, and got involved in some “pushing and shoving”. 

Finally Marc Dreier, the lawyer who allegedly ran a fraudulent investment scheme worth $380m, finds out whether he gets bail today. Yesterday prosecutors recommended he not be allowed bail, as he posed a high risk of fleeing Nadel-style. But in the face of seized assets, major criminal charges, and a mental-sounding son who destroyed dad’s mobile phones after the charges were made, their lawyer is confident: “I’m still confident of our position. I believe we have the better part of the argument”. Good luck with that one!

The wealth-manager has all of his three companies under investigation for multi-million pound fraud, and he was going through a messy divorce. If you’re thinking of faking you’re own suicide, you could perhaps pay closer attention to the in-flight showing of MacGyver; though a friend who was sent an email by Schrenker after the crash has claimed that the pilot has Special Ops training and a dual personality. Which is, frankly, a badass combination.

Another pilot offers Thucydides’s advice: “The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.” Said pilot is a bit like those goons who said how brave the 9/11 hijackers were; what’s brave is facing the music rather than going off on some Special Ops jolly while your clients get shafted. Schrenker merely joins French investor Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet who killed himself after losing a billion-dollars to the Madoff scandal, and Adolf Merckle who walked in front of a train after seeing his family company get broken up, in the ranks of rich men who left a legacy of sheer recklessness.

While Reuters gets all po-faced and semi-poetic (“On Tuesday pale blood stains still dotted the snow along the railway track where he died. The area looked deserted apart from a police car nearby”), let’s look not at his death itself but rather at a rather cruel juxtaposition of events today, considering the circumstances of Merckle’s downfall.

What really stung his businesses was a hedge on the price of VW shares going badly wrong, making a massive loss after Porsche revealed that they were well on the way to owning 75% of VW and spiking the share price; Merckle had hedged on a fall, and lost big. Previously Porsche announced its employees were making out like bandits from selling their shares, just as Merckle was entering talks and putting up his personal fortune as collateral; the two companies’ fortunes bifurcated even more sharply today, as while Merckle’s family mourn and try to save their family business, Porsche increased its stake in VW to more than 50%. It must now make a bid for Swedish truck manufacturer Scania, 69% of which is owned by VW; it’s also challenging, in the European courts, the block on it owning 20% of the company currently owned by the state of Lower Saxony. 

Not that Porsche is being crass in doing this, but the fallout from that one share announcement is astonishing. It’s testament to the strain placed on companies by highly leveraged speculation, and the potential enormity of gains and losses, both financial and emotional, from playing with such high stakes. If Merckle’s death can bring anything, it’s a moment of sobriety and reflection from those dancing between the poles of absolute poverty and unimaginable wealth, who often, as Merckle had, have a thousands-strong workforce relying on your judgement. I don’t want to do a Time and suggest that Merckle’s death symbolises or means anything outside of a personal tragedy, but I think it’s inevitable that he will come to represent the end of wild hedges, as the fund industry contracts and the party of the last few years comes to a sad end.

So first we had banks bailed out. Then guys like Adolf Merckle wanted the personal bailout treatment (not that he got it of course). And now the third wave of bailouts is happening, with companies getting cash from the government to keep them going and not send job cuts spiralling out of control.

So we’ll see today if the car industry in America is getting $15bn, more specifically GM and Chrysler. GM alone was hoping for $12bn, but it’ll just have to make do. You might remember that GM and Chrysler’s bosses got told after their first plea to come back when they had some more viable plans for sustainable product. So come back they did, with some whizzo new green cars, to show that they weren’t just going to keep churning out the old gas-guzzling models but provide something that was efficient and clean.

Holman W. Jenkins Jr, writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, says that these new cars are doomed from the start though, thanks to American drivers wanting to carry on driving big unless gas prices get really crazy. He’s got a point, and small cars seemingly have to be pretty luxurious and/or statement-y before Americans start to buy them. But America needs a shift towards smaller vehicles, and perhaps this government enforcement will be the catalyst it needs. The real challenge is not getting GM to come up with some green car designs, but finding a way to make them efficiently, paying wages the unions are happy with while managing to keep prices down for smaller cars. In some ways, the stranglehold of the United Auto Workers union is keeping the Big Three from expanding its portfolio of models; it doesn’t have room to work out how to make the cheap, small cars America needs.

Anyway, enough of them for now, as there’s a much more delicious bailout happening this week, namely the Italian government chucking money at the parmesan industry. They’re buying up 100,000 wheels of parmigiano and 100,000 of Gran Padano in a bailout worth 50m euros, drawn from a fund to help feed needy people; they’re couching it as sending the cheese to charity. So if you’re homeless in Italy, expect some serious flavour atop your soup ration!

So it seems if your product is a totem or icon for the country you’re in, you can expect sentimentality to breed you a pot of bailout cash. If you’re trading in something totally unsexy like iron ore across countless different countries, then you announce 14,000 job cuts. Not that I’m advocating unnecessarily ruthless capitalism, but hopefully we’ll get some kind of continuous auditing in place for everyone receiving bailout cash, to prove they’re actually a viable business rather than something nice to keep around the place. Because at the moment, given their portfolio of cars, that’s all that GM really is.

You may remember that Merckle was murked by short-selling shares in VW, which then skyrocketed after Porsche revealed they owned much of the company, thus losing Merckle, and many others who similarly hedged wrongly, hundreds of millions of euros. Porsche got criticised by some in the financial community, generally the hedge funders who lost big and presumably smashed up their own Porsches in acts of misplaced retribution.

So Merckle won’t be heartened to know that, in a moment of glorious financial symmetry, VW’s employees have made hundreds of millions of euros in selling their shares during the price spike. The board members themselves got in on the action, making €25m between them; meanwhile Merckle is having to dip into his personal fortune to help provide collateral to banks. God, that’s got to hurt.

VW has sensibly tried to morally legitimise this shameless exploitation of good fortune/share manipulation, with the executives announcing that they’re giving 10% of their windfall to charidee, helping little kinder in Wolfsburg where VW is based. Not sure that’s enough – I think you’d need to pay Wolfsburg’s college education and provide free school milk to prevent the inevitable howls of rage over the next few days. Yes, this truly is a classic week for unconvincing PR from major car manufacturers.

I like this bit of padding from the FT when they reported this story today: “The windfall for VW senior management is likely to create political controversy in Germany, where executives of large listed companies are commonly criticised for earning big bonuses”. I think that’s more of a non-Germany-specific thing really.

With consummate German efficiency, WEM issued a three-word statement today: “Negotiations are continuing”. From that we can deduce they haven’t got any money, and whoever’s going to give them some is playing hardball, considering negotiations have been going on since the 20th, when Merckle had to give banks guarantees from his personal fortune after VEM stock plunged. Among the banks involved in this charmingly personal bailout are RBS – must be nice for them to be on the normal side of a deal once again.

Merckle has hopefully avoided the papers today lest he become enraged at the sight of Wendelin Wiedeking, chief executive of Porsche, saying he had nothing to do with the massive inflation of VW’s shares, and it was all the fault of the hedge funds for running short. You will remember that Porsche quietly bought a lot of shares in VW, and then announced that it effectively owned it, causing the remaining 5% of shares to rocket in price and send Porsche’s profits similarly skyward, while those like Merckle who had bet on continuing falls lost big. But Wiedeking has said that to blame Porsche is absurd – after all, they want to increase their stake in VW to 75% soon, and they can’t do that at the current price.

Wiedeking joins Essex council today as people acting like benevolent socialist Care Bears, by pointing out that it’s been paying suppliers in advance, in order to bolster their liquidity in these times of crisis when the mean old German government won’t help them out. With banks refusing loans while trying to maintain minimum reserves, he warned that many healthy companies could go out of business very quickly without them: “We need banks to give credit, not just talk about credit ratings but start real actual lending to companies. These rules are choking us today. Stabilisation of the financial system has to take place rather than banks shifting hundreds of billions of euros to the European Central Bank to earn interest. They should be injecting money so healthy companies survive.”

I love that during this crisis everyone’s on their soapbox, but because no-one knows the answers, titans of business are flexing their political muscles and everyone’s actually listening. Of course Porsche have a vested interest in supplier chains staying strong, but isn’t this all a bit of a PR-pampering exercise from Wiedeking? Porsche goes from producer of CO2-burping twatmobiles to champion of the little guy – just the sort of image boost they need just as no-one can afford their product anymore.

Only 18 hours now Merckle! Boop beep boop beep…

Merckle is the world’s 94th richest man according to Forbes, Germany’s fifth, but his fortunes have been scuppered of late by those flash bastards Porsche. You may remember a couple of weeks back when Volkswagen briefly and ludicrously became the world’s largest company, thanks to Porsche letting slip that they actually now owned it, sending the VW share price rocketing. Merckle, like lots of hedge funds who didn’t see this coming, sold his shares in the company short, leading to a large three-digit million euro loss. Doesn’t look like Merckle is going to be troubling the Mittals and Ambanis in the next year’s Rich List.

In normal times, Merckle would probably have to have a lie down, nurse his wounds, and fire a lot of people. But these are crazy times, remember! So he’s asking his home state of Baden-Wurttemberg to bail him out, according to a banker who spoke with the FT yesterday.

Before you vom in anger at this apparent willlingness to blag state funds to patch up personal speculation errors, consider that he employs 100,000 people, many in Baden-Wurttemberg, and the state wouldn’t want them to lose their jobs. This news coming out is already hurting his companies – Heidelberg Cement, of which Merckle owns 80%, saw their share price drop 22% yesterday.

So if you are feeling the recession impinging upon your wealth, maybe you should give Darling a call. I know I speculated heavily on Spanish beer and cheap flights this summer, and now I’m left exposed. Help a brother out!