News today that the last of the Kennedy brothers, Teddy Kennedy has died after a long battle with a brain tumour.

Despite living in the shadows of his more famous martyred siblings John and Robert for much of his life (and with the ghost of his brother Joseph who was killed in WWII - Teddy was the only one of the four brothers to die of natural causes), Teddy Kennedy was a highly influential figure in US politics for decades.

He was also a figure that courted much controversy for a variety of reasons;

His hard drinking and womanising was legendary, but almost cost him his career in 1969, when he drove a car off a bridge at Chappaquiddick near his home, killing his female passenger Mary Jo Kopechne, a former campaign worker for his brother Robert.

He was an outspoken supporter of Irish Republicanism for many years, which didn't make him many friends in the UK, but he later became instrumental in the negotiations between the British government, The Ulster paramilitaries and Sinn Fein which largely brought an end to the 30 years of violence, still ironically referred to as "the Troubles".

In the US, Teddy was a dominant force in liberal politics for decades; in 1962 he became the country's youngest senator and as a senator in Massachusetts, he was re-elected 7 times. He championed healthcare and education reform, was an outspoken opponent of the Bush regime, the Iraq war and prisoner abuse scandals, and was a valued supporter of President Obama.

Perhaps now he is reunited with his brothers

...and if he is, I bet he's buying the first round.

BBC video of the moment

Yay!

There's been a spate of stories in the press recently, where various industry pundits are heralding the end of the recession. In true pundit style, the sources are covering their arses by throwing in the "but let's not get overconfident just yet" caveats, but the jist of it all, is that things are less crap than they were not so long ago.

And I reckon that's at least partly because of me.

I have the worst success record in any form of financial investment that you can imagine. Stocks, shares, commodities, foreign exchange...you name it and I've lost money on it. I seem to have an unerring knack of buying just when the market peaks and then selling just after it bottoms out and recovers. When I go away on holiday and need to get any form of foreign currency, you can just bet that the exchange rate is about as far from being in my favour as it's possible to be. When I return from holiday the exchange rate has turned around completely so any FX I still have is all but worthless when converted back into quids.

Not long after credit crunch really started to bite, I took a look at my modest savings (almost choking on the pitiful interest now being earned) and examined my small stock portfolio (with dividends cut to zero and prices falling through the floor, it was also earning squat). Even my mutual fund pension was running at a loss and worth about 15% less than what I had paid into it, for over 20 years (thanks to being taken over by a bunch of carpet-bagging arseholes who invested heavily in a long list of high-risk property ventures that failed). As I gazed sadly at the state of it all, I pondered what I should do to try and stop what little I still had, from being quietly flushed around the investment u-bend of life.

The one item which seemed to be steadily increasing in value was gold and although it had risen to a record high, it looked like it was going to continue it's unparalleled rise for some time to come.

With my lousy investment track record, I was reluctant to buy any gold initially, but as I sat on my hands watching the price steadily climb in the following weeks (and taking a big jump when the Madoff investment scandal broke) I figured it was worth a crack.

I sold off my dying shares (for a fair few quid less than I paid for them) and likewise close out my meagre savings account, before making the necessary arrangements for a small purchase, and storing the paperwork safely in the vaults of my solicitor.

In the first couple of weeks after the purchase, the troy ounce price rose a little...and then proceeded to take a fairly significant dive. And about this time, I first started seeing the "Recession is over" stories appearing in the press.

Bollocks!

My investment track record is so uniformly bad, that it has been suggested to me that I should use it to my advantage; to get back at all the companies that have pissed me off over the years. Just think of the damage I might be able to do, to companies like Microsoft and Google, merely by purchasing a small number of shares and then sitting back and watching their value plummet.

Maybe my luck won't so bad after all.