Bandits With Begging Bowls

The euro zone’s banks, seen by many as the source of the region’s debt crisis, will ultimately be bailed out by “vested interests,” Sean Corrigan, chief investment strategist, Diapason Commodities Management, said. “There may be one or two forced to merge or to fall by the wayside, but all the vested interests will come back together,” he said. “We don’t allow for the market or competitive forces to come to their full severity, and when these guys act like bandits in the good times and come with begging bowls in the bad, we criticize capitalism.”

On the euro zone deal:

“They have averted a collapse this way, but they themselves don’t know what they have put in place,” Corrigan said of the EU leaders. “There’s this idea that it will conduct some little bit of magic, that these guys in the financial markets, who we hate, have been conducting and this will simply make Italy’s debt lower and Greece competitive. Yet nobody knows what the details are.”

On policy closer to home:

“Whether or not you believe the government should be setting banking policy rather than bankers, the issue is that the government didn’t take any executive control,” Corrigan said. “If that’s going to happen, there should be a clear program of forcibly putting the bank back in the hands of the market in a set time. I don’t see that happening in Britain.”

Sean of course had more to say that didn’t make it into the article, but even so, it’s great to see our message relayed in the mainstream press.