June 25, 2007

The growth of global finance is not that free or muscular.

Sir, all you say in “Why finance will not be unfettered” June 25, might be indeed be right but nevertheless you say it wrong. Yes the market has grown tremendously but if you truly believe that this has more to do with “seeking out pockets of undervaluation” than the exploitation of new instruments for temporary overvaluation, you are a true optimist. Unfortunately when the marking to the market of today’s almost incestually benign models and conditions need to be marked to the markets of the future, and we begin discovering where the risks have been hiding out, will probably find a lot of fat and very little muscular tissue in the growth. And to talk about “liberation of finance” and “unchained financial capitalism” when you have forcibly chained so much of the market to the opinions of some very few credit rating agencies reminds me of when Arthur Koestler describes how he as a young and utterly illusioned student, was able to see freedom in the communist Soviet.