by Bill Bonner Bill Clinton should have gone to the Alps. Instead, the poor man went to the piedmont...to the aid of his wife in South Carolina.
At the annual Davos, Switzerland, conference of celebs, power-brokers, and do-gooders, Clinton was always a hit. In Carolina, he was a flop.
If he’d been in Davos, he might have given the meeting some of the magic of the old days. Every year, the movers and shakers gather to tell each other how to make a better world. Most just blather in a way that began naïvely, early in their careers, soured into cynicism in middle age, and finally becomes merely stupid. Some probably still think they can improve things. A few probably succeed.
But this year’s meeting seems to have had a defeatist tone to it. Probably because the news was bad.
Last Sunday, it was discovered that a young man at an old bank had managed to get himself into $50 billion worth of positions – most of them losing positions. This was more than half of the value of all of France’s gold and currency reserves. It was more than the entire value that had been built up by the bank over decades. How could it happen? What was wrong? How could banks be so fragile...and what could you think of the whole world’s financial system when it was built with bricks that cracked up so readily?
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