Saturday, May 01, 2010

A political bit, and a financial bit

I realise a couple of things recently which frustrate me. (And I'm going back to my roots of studying PPE and being an economist.)
1. About this election. I never realised the extent to which Labour has gerrymandered over the past decade. They can get the smallest number of votes, but still be the largest party. The strength of the Lib Dems has shown this up.

2. The banks clearly want something new to have to trade. No more CDOs, corporate shares to bankrupt. So they try it out on Greece. It has an implicit possibility that I'm sure they'd love. If the Euro collapsed they can get back to the game of currency dealing with all the arcane ones which they can use of carry trades, such as drachma, peseta etc. At present, the existence of the euro means 16 less that they can play around with. Yet they have the traders - ranging from MIT Ph.Ds to Essex traders - needing something to do to make money. A few guys sit in Goldman Sachs creating some off balance sheet deals for Greece. Do they link that to the photo on the front page of the FT yesterday of riot police?
Probably not. Yet they should.

No comments: