Who gave us the best investment quotes last month?
The ongoing disagreement regarding how to handle Greece's debt crisis has been interesting to watch, and has led to the airing of some strong opinions.
"Why should you support people who've been living high on the hog on someone else's money?", said Jim Rogers in an interview with Bloomberg Television, who added he has bought euros because the market has "massive amounts of short positions" in the single currency. But, he says, "the euro will probably break up in the next 15 to 20 years".
Opinion in Germany was equally strong. The populist Bild newspaper ran the headline "Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks, and the Acropolis too!".
When a former Greek minister, Margaritis Tzimas, asked "how does Germany have the cheek to attack us over our finances when it has still not paid compensation for Greece's war victims?", it caused British-based German comedian Henning Wehn to wonder "looking at their level of debt it can't be long before Manchester United demand money of Germany for the bombing of Old Trafford".
Seeing red
I don't know if that thought occurred to Jim O'Neill, the chief economist at Goldman Sachs, when he was putting together his plans to take over the club with his fellow investors, dubbed the 'Red Knights'.
O'Neill, who famously coined the term 'BRIC', continues to be bullish on Russia. "Everyone assumes that Russia will always be status quo but as with any supply side policies, desire creates the reality", O'Neill told Reuters. "So it is just a matter of people getting correctly focused on the key issues, and one of the key issues is to create an environment to encourage and help non-energy based ventures … They've had a good start to the year. I'm impressed."
Someone with a very different opinion of Russia is Bill Browder, head of hedge fund Hermitage Capital, who was expelled from the country for being a "threat to national security", and who had his assets confiscated. His lawyer later died after eleven months in police custody.
Browder told Bloomberg on Tuesday: "I've travelled to 27 countries looking at investment markets … I have never seen any country that has corruption on the [same] order of magnitude as Russia."
Hugh's back
Hedge funds come in for a lot of criticism, and not just in Russia. One of the few hedge fund bosses to openly defend the industry is Hugh Hendry, of Eclectica Asset Management.
"Hedge funds have been right. When hedge funds are right, but it goes against political will, then it's something to be derided, and we've now created this pejorative term that speculation is just bad. … Unlike the banking sector, if a hedge fund gets into difficulty it stands to lose everything."
Taking a swipe at the mainstream financial industry, Hendry says "banks and pensions funds act in the manner of sheep … they are herding institutions, and what we find periodically is that they find themselves trapped in the financial smut district, the financial red-light district; they should never have been there -- they should never have been speculating in these preposterously silly American mortgages".
Bringing us back to where we started, Hendry says, "what has been revealed this year is that they were in the financial smut district of lending money to Greece -- now they thought they were being very clever because they were getting an extra return, but what they were not measuring was the extra risk."
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