November 02, 2015

Banks are dangerously overpopulating the traditional save havens of widows, orphans and pension funds.

Sir, Attracta Mooney quotes Pascal Blanqué, deputy chief executive of Amundi, stating: “QE has proved a mixed blessing. It prevented a 1929-style depression after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. But it has also delivered unintended consequences for longterm investors. The challenge for policymakers is to address them.” “QE ‘acted like an opaque tax’ on pension funds” November 2.

Again someone is speaking about unintended consequences, instead of referring to what obviously should have been expected consequences.

With QEs injecting liquidity into safe investments; with bank regulations awarding huge incentives through the capital requirements for banks to finance what is safe; with bank regulations awarding additional huge incentives through liquidity requirements for banks to hold what is safe, and with sovereign debt having been decreed as ultra-safe and assigned a zero risk weight, there can be no doubt that the financial safe havens of the world are bound to become dangerously overpopulated. Where is a widow or an orphan to take refuge nowadays… in Argentinian railroad projects?

@PerKurowski ©