Buhlmann's Corner

Leaky Umbrellas

Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF world bailout umbrella, has got stuck. At the start of an official investigation for breach of trust a Prussian official would have resorted to the gun, or at least a duelling pistol. A rudderless Europe takes shelter under its own umbrella, although top European José Manuel Barroso rates it as faulty after just two weeks. Presumably he was just off for a fortnight’s holiday and had no smarter way to tell his colleagues something.

They pervert the financial crisis into a holiday crisis and fail to see that in fact it was and is a crisis of confidence. Anyone looking at the Websites of the two Spanish IPOs Bankia and Banca Cívica is bound to wonder at the childish respect one pays investors there! VIP wants to change that: for women and for the rest of the world, there should be voting receipts from the AGM, and agenda changes like the recent ones by Ferdinand Piëch should be immediately available to the female voters and their male counterparts. Then it should be equally clear that, with subtle legal practices, 150 million euros of market capitalization were cut out of the Vodafone AGM last month – VIP was to represent two shareholders there, but that failed because the shareholder’s will of registered shareholder State Street was not implemented, or in such a way that our representative was sent home with his 150 million euros by the issuer’s service provider.

Unless that changes, we’ll be like the Italians. They send their prosecutors to Standard & Poor’s to investigate whether there has been profiteering from investments here because of certain statements. The assertive Munich prosecutors also currently have that on their table: they think the ratings and opinion people were the profiteers.

Not that the banks are any better. Barclay’s economist says in a television interview that the banks now expect a debt-reducing contribution from the State – although it was they, the banks, who took the biggest mouthful out of the liability and debt bottle. What the commentators forget is that it was only 40 months ago that it was the end of the world when a CEO could not move straight to the Supervisory Board chairmanship. Now even DSW people lament that it is regrettable to have to forego the cooperation of Wenning, Hambrecht & Co. for 24 months (even though their boss is at Weber-Rey beavering away at the Code). And today at the Deutsche Bank commentators see it as the Decline of the West if a cooling-off period is dispensed with – although there is nothing worse than when two alpha animals draw the same ox carts and grain after grain falls off the wagon. In their view of the world beyond the Main, there was only ever Josef Ackermann, whom Alfred Herrhausen begat.