Comment and analysis from the FT,
Gapper: London must scare insider dealers
They take enforcement seriously at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They get Gordon Gekko to warn off hedge fund managers from trading on inside information, and they tap the phones of suspects. Compared with that, hedge fund managers in Mayfair and Geneva, where Philippe Jabre moved after being fined £750,000 for market abuse at the GLG hedge fund in 2006, have things easy. The small minority that breaks the rules has a much lower chance of either being caught or, when caught, jailed.
Smaghi: Banks should learn to go it alone
With the €530bn lent to banks through its latest three-year longer-term refinancing operation, the size of the European Central Bank’s balance sheet has increased to unprecedented levels, raising three separate concerns. Not all are justified.
Verhofstadt: Germany knows ways to solve crisis
European Union leaders are meeting in Brussels on Friday for their regular Spring economic summit and should finally sign off – Ireland excepted – on the latest bail-out deal for Greece. But as they prepare to put their pens to paper, it is clear that we have not solved the debt problem at the heart of the eurozone. Greece’s bail-out is optimistically forecast to reduce its debt to gross domestic product ratio to about 120 per cent by 2020. But, even assuming that this is plausible, what next after Greece? What if Spain or Italy went bankrupt? Can the eurozone’s firewall contain the conflagration?
Rattner: Buffett is right – stocks will trump bonds
I’m betting that Mr Buffett will be proved correct. Over a reasonable period of time, shares will almost surely outperform fixed income instruments. (If they don’t, centuries of finance theory will have to be discarded.)