…the backlash against those nasty conspiratorial financial speculators who have caused all this sovereign debt crisis stuff, that is.
The following quotes come from a Newsnight interview with Christine Lagarde, France’s finance minister.
She was asked what message she would like to send to speculators. To which she replied:
“They’d better be careful there is clearly a statement of solidarity, we are closing ranks , big or small member states, we are all in this together, and not going to let any of us down”.
“What we are going to take away from this crisis is certainly a second look at the validity , solidity of cds on sovereign risk, and clearly we need to look deeply into that and propose changes.”
“It confirms our determination to actually to bring more transparency into this equation.”
Those changes, we guess, will probably include some ham-fisted attempt to ensure that buyers of protection have some “skin in the game” – i.e. own the underlying sovereign security.
Related link:
My big fat short-selling deterrent – FT Alphaville
Alert over short-selling disclosure rules – FT
The euro’s WMD danger to hedge fund “especuladores” – Ft-dot-comment