Wolfgang Schäuble - foto from Wikipedia Bundestagsbüro Wolfgang Schäuble
Brussels also wants these private banks to accept ‘haircuts’ – losses- of 30%-50% of their holdings in Greek debt instead of the presently agreed 21%.
In other words private banks should not be exempted.
He has often stated that Greece’s debt should be reduced so that the country can plan ahead and thereupon look towards a dependable future. Not doing so would in fact create even greater uncertainty for both Greece and the other Euro zone members.
He reportedly made these comments addressing his own CDU- Christian Democratic Union party members yesterday.
He also alluded to the inequalities of private losses becoming public losses because all too often private profit on public investments remained private and were never shared with the taxpayer.
Many credit-derivitive speculators have benefited privately with their huge profits, but then attempt to push their equally large losses onto society at large, particularly via groveling and suppine governments.
Refering to this privatizing of profits and the socializing of losses Schäuble said this was completely un-democratic and would oppose any public-purse money being spent to compensate for these private losses.
Schäuble also wants the European Union to implement a tax on financial transactions to curtail the activities of caustic and usurious speculative private sector investors.
The UK, one of the major culprits of so-called deregulated -but infact- ‘Casino-banking’, is not part of the Euro and is extremely hostile to the idea of this tax.
The wheel-chair bound no-nonsense type of German Finance Minister, Schäuble is respected in Europe for his common-sense approach to good financial house-keeping and his consistent economic acumen. He does not want Europe to start printing ‘easy and cheap money’ to deal with its financial crisis.
This recent action by the German Finance minister follows the sentiment on both sides of the Atlantic that the credit-derivatives market – which at one time had about 20 trillion $USD worth in the markets- which when they went bad needed and got huge tax-payers bailouts.
This tax is an attempt to bring the credit-derivative market out into the open an into public scrutiny while it has in the past always been hidden, by yes bankers but also politicians and journalists. No-one previously asked the hard questions about the risk that was happening in the credit-derivatives world and why credit was booming in the middle of huge excesses. There was no public scrutiny at this time and this has now turned into public opprobrium of the whole banking world in general and the UK and US banking world in particular.
The latest “anti-Wall Street movement” is a direct –and very healthy and timely- consequence of this sentiment. See previous OTA-Berlin blog article on this subject -http://www.ota-berlin.de/blog/10/06/got-to-save-the-banks-blame-it-on-those-lazy-greeks-berlin-funny-fotos-pull-up-those-piigs-poster-in-berlin/
While the European banks and governments have to carry their share of the blame for their participation in these credit-derivative activities – it was the perilous activates on Wall Street and in “the City” where they flourished and gave rise to the AIG and Lehmanm Brothers fiascos.
Schäuble’s recent comments were made after the Bank of England’s recent decision to print over 75 Billion Pounds as part of what is euphemistically referred to as “Quantitative easing”.
Read this article for more information on Bank of England and QE or “Quantitative easing” -
Read also this recent OTA-Berlin Constituency Blog article about Euro-
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No to ‘Quantitative easing’ – ‘No to privatizing of profits and the socializing of losses’ and ‘No to instant easy-fix solutions’ says German Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schäuble – by OTA-Berlin Constituency Blog contributor Mr W van Coeveren from OTA Berlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Germany License. If you use this article or parts of it, please refer to http://www.ota-berlin.de.
Tags: AIG fiasco, anti-Wall Street movement, Bank of England printing presses, Casino-banking no solution, EU tax on financial transactions, German Finance Minister Schäuble, germany and greek debt, Lehmanm Brothers, Occupy Wall Street, privatizing of profits - socializing of losses, Quantitative easing” no solution, schauble, take a hair-cut or be given a hair-cut, UK Casino-banking, wheel-chair bound German Finance Minister
These so called credit-derivatives are indeed pretty criminal.
Gillian Tett’s very good book FOOLS GOLD deals with this.
I hope the anti-Wall Street movement takes off!!
na
Agreed- I know this book. w v coeveren