Something hasn´t changed
published on 15/09/2009 inwww.cittanuova.it
A year after the Lehman Brothers fell into bankruptcy, the event which set off the financial crisis, large banks´ old bad habits have come back. Obama himself addressed a strong warning towards the financial world yesterday. Something has happened, however, on the local level. We give you an interview with Prof. Luigino Bruni, economist at the University of Milan-Bicocca.
Wells Fargo´s top manager celebrated the first anniversary of the collapse of the Lehman Brothers with a sumptuous party in Malibu. The "creative" financial tools have come back, just like the stellar stipends for financial executives. Have we really not learned anything from what happened?
«It´s a good question, but it would really seem like the answer is no. It´s enough to think of Stanley Morgan, a bank that was saved with public money. Now that it´s making profit again, it has announced one-million dollar rewards for every director. Personally, I find that offensive. The way of carrying ahead finance is similar to what it was before the crisis. The lesson on moral risk was received at the political level, but there hasn´t been any real change. And anyways, it´s true that the same rating agencies that were responsible for the collapse continue to work like they did before. At this rate, the risk of another crisis is concrete».
The OCSE (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) sees signs of recovery for Italy, and a few days ago, Obama affirmed that, although not yet "out of trouble", the American economy is "far from the abyss". Can we be optimistic?
«Heads of state do their work, which also consists in avoiding creating alarm. Especially in dealing with economy, panic usually starts on its own. They may do well by being optimistic, but I cannot be the same. We still don´t know for certain how much the missing payments by closed companies will weigh on banks. I don´t believe that it´s possible to say how much longer the recession will last».