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Department of Extremely Bad Ideas

Friday, 4th July 2008

Hw did we in fact get to the point where financial illiterates get to propose policy for an entire continent?

Tony Robinson, chief spokesman for the Socialist Group in the European Parliament, said the capitalist system had disgraced itself and must now face much stricter regulation.

"There is a groundswell of opinion building up for action at a European level. Our group wants a ban on all investment funds speculating on food. We support a proper functioning market, but what we have seen in this crisis is a most distasteful morality where decisions are driven by greed. Hedge funds have used debt to take over companies and strip out their assets. This must stop," he said.

Leave aside the obvious point that speculation is both desired and necessary in a market based system: how will farmers be able to fix their crop prices in advance by selling futures if there are no investment funds able to buy them?

Concentrate instead on the comment about hedge funds. Hedge funds do not in fact purchase companies, they don't use debt to do so and they don't strip them of their assets (something which even if they did would be better described as moving assets from lower to higher valued employment, something which is the very definition of wealth creation). Mr. Robinson is here getting hedge funds confused with private equity funds, beasts of a very different nature.

So could someone remind me again, how did we get into this situation, where some twit who simply has no idea what he is talking about, gets to try and make policy for an entire continent?

Further, once we've worked that out can we reverse it please?