Do Telegraph, achei interessante (os sublinhados sao meus). E com certeza colocaram a culpa nos traders, quando realmente quem estava vendendo as acoes de bancos podres eram os money managers.
BTW, the Labor Party is a dead dog.
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A tumultuous week for the world's financial system ended with the London FTSE registering its biggest rise in a single day and stock markets rallying around the globe. To call this a roller-coaster fails to do justice to the scariness of the ride. The eternal verities of capitalism have been challenged by the country most wedded to free enterprise, which has nationalised its two largest mortgage providers and taken into effective state ownership an insurer with global reach. George W Bush rightly called it a "pivotal moment".
Institutions with venerable pedigrees have gone bust, billions have been pumped by central banks into the markets and legitimate practices, like short-selling, have been outlawed, if only temporarily, for financial stocks. Most extraordinarily of all, the US Treasury is proposing to create a super-bad bank that will take the "toxic" debt - the illiquid assets - off embattled financial institutions and underpin the market with hundreds of billions of dollars. Any one of these panicky, though decisive, interventions would have had enormous consequences for the financial system; taken together, they are truly astounding. This is capitalism, but not as we know it; and someone will have to pay, almost certainly the long-suffering taxpayer.
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These are dangerous times for those who believe in free markets. The evidence of greed is too obvious to be shrugged aside. Then again, it is too easy to blame the City slickers and their fat bonuses for the crisis. A sober analysis of what happened to HBOS shows that most of its shares were off-loaded by institutional holders and traditional asset managers, not by short-sellers. The sharp-suited traders, however, are a convenient target for those who have never felt comfortable with their support for free enterprise, notably the Labour Party, whose annual conference begins today.
Already the drumbeats of the Left are sounding. The siren song of Harriet Harman, the deputy leader, can be heard luring Mr Brown on to the rocks of old-fashioned socialist interventionism. It is all the more compelling because her attack on the antics in the City is hard to gainsay. The sight of the people chiefly responsible for the mess emerging unscathed, even rewarded with shares and new jobs, sticks in the craw. If capitalism is to mean anything, and is to demonstrate its resilience, then failure must bring a reckoning for the people who gambled with our pension funds, and lost. They must lose, too. Over the next two weeks, the main political parties have the opportunity to make clear where they stand in the fallout from the Crash of '08. Mr Brown, who as a willing convert to the wayward monetary policies espoused by Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman, is one of the architects of the debacle, must resist the temptation to appease his party's desire for City blood to save his own neck. He should face down the rabid Left, as Gaitskell did over nuclear disarmament at Scarborough in 1960.
The signs are not good. He has promised to "clean up the City" without giving any inkling as to what this means. If it is a return to traditional lending practices, tighter credit and careful spending, all well and good. But before Mr Brown turns his attention to the City, he should clean up his own act. Figures this week showing that public borrowing in August was £10 billion were truly dreadful. Despite significant growth in the economy, national debt has grown from 29.6 per cent of GDP in March 2002, to 43.3 per cent. Why should anyone take lectures in prudent market practices from a government that has been so reckless with the public finances? There will be a reckoning here, too, at the ballot box. What we do not want to see from the governing party over the next few days, but almost certainly will, is a protracted bout of political navel gazing as they desperately try to find a way out of the political hole they have dug for themselves. In an interview last night, Mr Brown said this was ''a time for people who know how to deal with difficult economic circumstances". Is he up to the challenge?
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