This was the most delicious detail in an utterly delightful story. To read in the FT that these tough guys wept because no one had told them Porsche had built up a stake in the carmaker must have delighted many commuters as they made their chilly way to work last Wednesday.
It filled me with special satisfaction as I had just been doing some detailed textual analysis of the letters that hedge funds have sent out to investors in the last few weeks to explain away their abominable performance in the third quarter.
There is much to deplore in these, but the phrase that most stuck in my gullet came from Greenlight Capital (one of the funds to have lost heavily in Volkswagen). It signed off its letter with the quotation: “There's no crying in baseball.” This managed to be both butch and banal; to quote glibly from a Tom Hanks movie when you have made the savings of your investors shrink was insultingly crass. And now we know it isn't even apt: there may or may not be no crying in baseball, but there is crying in hedge funds.