“We can’t tolerate hedge funds buying a company with debt, firing a quarter of the staff and then enriching themselves by selling it in pieces. We didn’t create the euro to have capitalism without ethics or morals.”
That’s what The Telegraph is attributing to Nicolas Sarkozy, the supposed free market, neo-Gaullist favourite in the French presidential run-off this Sunday.
First it was the “heirs of May 1968″ that have been eroding the moral values of capitalism, now it’s speculators, with no distinction being made here between hedge funds and private equity.
Apparently he is going to “hit predators” with a tax on speculators — a reference, perhaps, to a variation of the the Tobin tax idea, where a levy on foreign exchange trading would fund development in poor parts of the world.
As The Telegraph points out, the hedge fund industry has been quietly thriving in Paris — second only to London in terms of density of alternative investment managers.
“Look at what we do, not at what we say,” said Vincent Kuhn, managing director of Bryan Garnier asset management in Paris. “A sweet smell of sulphur surrounds the hedge fund industry here. We’re lumped together with all the cosmopolitan speculators said to be wrecking the French economy.”