Moya Lázaro, Fernando.
To understand this essay is essential to read this article: http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,781590,00.html
Becoming richer has never been so easy to who were already wealthy. On the contrary, a few years ago we were all rich; at least it is what we thought. Now benefits are not in the subprime mortgages nor in new technologies; now it is speculation.
Speculators play with the money of several investors and get quick and large benefits; no matter who or what is damaged. They also seek for any little crack in the system, and if they don’t find one, well they can create one. Currently, anyone controls the market; every little rumor is taken as a fact. In this jumpy state, speculators play harder than ever to take advantage of the fear and anxiety of the markets.
The governments are unable to do anything against these movements. They have lost their power because they are not blameless; the accumulation of debt left them in the weakest position in front of banks and corporations. Nowadays it is almost impossible to countries to put their bonds into the market. Banks are nearly the owners of countries.
A few months ago, banks were in the edge, but they made themselves essentials for governments. Governments worldwide gave bailouts to banks and save them from where they put themselves. What were governments so afraid of?
Markets should be controlled; they have shown many times that if they are left in their own will the system doesn’t work. Players think individually, and it is normal, and try to get more money, and it is normal too. But what happen when they don’t get the results they were looking for? Someone has to pay, no matter who is swept away, a person, a culture, a country.
Bankers, as players, have been designing complicate product to take out of nowhere as much benefits as they can. They think that a quiet market doesn’t produce quick benefits; they are craving for picks and valleys. But it means that the market is anxious, so a rumor can lead a country or a company to dance on the edge of the bankruptcy. Like Greece, no matter what it does to tame the crisis, because in one second a whisper in Germany could collapse the whole UE. When these actions are bad for countries is very easy to stop them, but governments are always one, or ten, steps behind; and sometimes it seems that they want to be there. As I read that investors are increasingly using computer to predict and move faster in markets, I realized that governments have no chance.
I don’t know how to manage the information about Italy and Deutsche Bank. On one hand, I think that Deutsche bank’s behavior is what anyone expects. If I had been in charge of the bonds’ section and I had known that Italian bonds would fall down; I would have done the same as Deutsche Bank did. But on the other hand, Deutsche Bank could have had privileged information or they could have created the crisis of the Italian bonds intentionally.
Governments have a rough time in front of them. They have to fight against the crisis, while they try not to make big players angry and not leaving them on their own. Also trying to cope with their communities which don’t trust in them, they are not opinion leaders anymore, they are statesmen so far from people that they only persuade them with monetary assistance.
There is no one at the wheel in Europe; we have fewer options as the time goes by. So, or the EU leaders go into a room, seal themselves and they don’t leave it until they reach an agreement to work together or the EU is finished.
URL:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,781590,00.html