January 07, 2009

Viva the President of the European Union!

Sir though I do not agree with his laisser faire attitude towards the climate change I must express my deepest thanks to Vaclav Klaus for giving reason a voice and blaming the “immodest and overconfident politicians playing with the market” for the current economic crisis, “Do not tie the markets – free them” January 7.

His words remind me of those uttered by the Joker (in the name of the free market) in the movie The Dark Knight, 2008. “You know, they're schemers. Schemers trying to control their worlds. I'm not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are. It's the schemers that put you where you are. I just did what I do best. I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few…” collateralized debt obligations.When I think of a small group of bureaucratic finance nerds in Basel thinking themselves capable of exorcizing risks out of banking, for ever, by cooking up silly formulas of minimum capital requirements for banks based on some vaguely defined risks of default; and thereafter creating a risk information oligopoly empowering the credit rating agencies and which doomed, sooner or later, the world to be guided over a precipice of systemic risks; like what happened with the lousily awarded mortgages to the subprime sector, I cannot but shiver when I hear about giving even more advanced powers to the schemers.