L'importanza della trasparenza nei mercati.

Beh il superbailout qualche effetto l'ha avuto: le borse sono rimbalzate e i prezzi dei CDS sul debito sovrano dei PIIGS sono diminuiti considerevolmente. Solo l'euro continua una malinconica discesa (ma a mio avviso i fondamentali la giustificano).

Il primo trimestre del 2010 è stato eccezionale per i trading desks di Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase & Company che sono riuscite a guadagnare ogni giorno!

C'è un interessante articolo sul New York Times che sviluppa un parallelo tra il debito della Grecia e dei paesi più deboli dell'area euro e il debito USA (che si prevede raggiungere il 140% del GDP alla fine del prossimo decennio).

Infine vi segnalo l'editoriale del NYTimes dedicato alle misure necessarie per evitare il ripetersi di un minicrash come quello del 6 maggio. Scrive giustamente il NYTimes:


What could be worse than a 20-minute, 1,000-point drop in the stock market? A 20-minute, 1,000-point drop that defies explanation.(...)
What the experts could agree on is that differing rules among various exchanges about temporarily halting or slowing trading made the drop worse. In that light, regulators took the right steps earlier this week, to immediately revise marketwide circuit breakers that stop trading during a major decline and to draft similar rules for individual stocks.(...) Writing in March in Finance & Development, a journal of the International Monetary Fund, Randall Dodd highlighted three trading strategies in which the potential for instability may outweigh any efficiency gains:
¶High-frequency trading can match thousands of buyers and sellers a minute, creating bigger and more abrupt price changes than would otherwise be the case.
¶Flash trading occurs when buy or sell prices flash on a trader’s screen before becoming public, allowing the trader to act before others in the market have the information. The New York Stock Exchange has rightly outlawed flash trading. The S.E.C. has proposed to ban flash trades but has not yet finalized its rule. After last week, the agency should move quickly.
¶The S.E.C. also must move quickly to finalize proposed rules to regulate dark pools, electronic trading systems used by big investors to conduct large trades without going through a fully transparent exchange. That allows large transactions to occur without moving the market price, but it does so by selectively sharing market information, rendering publicly available information about prices unreliable.
Figuring out what went wrong is important but is only a first step in restoring investor confidence.