You don’t have to be a rabid libertarian or Marxist historian with leather patches on his jacket to look at the current world banking crisis and ask “Cui bono…?“

“Who benefits?” as the criminal lawyer demands of the jury. And curiously enough, at first glance at least, the lawyers look set to clean up once more.

“Investors and their lawyers filed 70 securities-fraud class actions in the first quarter,” reports Conde Nast’s Portfolio.com, “almost the same number that were filed in the first half of 2007, according to NERA Economic Consulting, which tracks the filing of these complaints.”

Twenty-six of the 70 new cases in 2008 to date are linked to the sub-prime disaster, with Bear Stearns cited alongside J.P.Morgan, Lehman Brothers, T.D.Ameritrade Morgan Stanley and 14 other firms.

“The increase in filings continues a trend that began in the second half of last year,” says Portfolio.com, quoting NERA. “That spike pushed class-action filings up 58% in 2007, compared with the year earlier. Plaintiffs filed 207 cases last year, versus 131 in 2006.”

Thus we’re left yet again here at BullionVault wishing that legal firms were listed stocks, rather than private partnerships! Outside the courts, is there anyone climbing ahead on this mess of defaults, missed margin calls, foreclosures and lost jobs?

Investment bank staff are already pretending they’ve had a round-the-world trip planned for this summer since, oh, since they realized investment banking wasn’t for them anyway. Latest estimates in the City of London put the losses between 6,500 and 30,000 by autumn next year – almost twice the kill-rate of the Tech Stock Crash.

Over in the plush hedge-fund suites a mile or two west in Mayfair, Plexus Partners lost one-third of its value since January after screwing up its arbitrage trades. Another crazy-named hedge fund – Polygon – has tried to stop its investors withdrawing their cash to defend its future. And sticking to English, rather than Latin, failed to save Russell Investments in New York from closing two of its three hedge funds this week. They dumped two-thirds of their value inside six months.

Only global-macro hedge funds showed any real gains so far this year, according to Hedge Fund Review, returning an average of 11.5% in the first 10 weeks. But given they’ve had to wait six years for a decent surge (at last!) in asset-price volatility to start attracting new business, it hardly seems worth the bother.

Sitting tight at the other end of that see-saw called risk, meantime, cash savers made a little on interest rates thanks to the “dash for cash” by banks across the world, but they gave it all back to inflation and sleepless nights, even with Federal deposit insurance sitting behind the first $100,000 of potential losses.

Money-market fund managers did well to start with, but new savers turned tail last week, reports Forbes, sucking out $7.2 billion as stories spread of fund values slipping below the dollar. Higher-return funds like Schwab’s YieldPlus got caught in a “death spiral” of plunging asset prices, says the Motley Fool. And now the annualized yield offered by apparently “interest-bearing” six-month CDs ticked down from 1.95% to 1.87% this week, says BankRate.com. So don’t all rush in at once!

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