New Statesman – If hedge funds were a country, it would be the eighth-biggest on the planet. They can sink whole economies, and have the potential to crash the entire global financial system. Yet they are beyond regulation. We should be very afraid.
Something ominous is going on in world finance – again. On 11 May, the US Federal Reserve, America’s central bank, raised rates and hinted that it might do so again. Wall Street wobbled but stock markets in the emerging economies fell through the floor. Since that day, Colombia’s stock market has slumped by 42 per cent; Turkey’s by 38 per cent; Pakistan and Egypt by 28 per cent; India by 25 per cent; the Czech Republic by 22 per cent.
Why? These fast-developing economies have been the recent darlings of the world’s mobile capital, acting as magnets for multinational corporations seeking new frontiers. Yes, the US economy is still the biggest in the world and changes in US interest rates affect the entire global financial system. But there is something very dark indeed at the heart of this story and it is called the hedge-fund industry – lords of havoc who, a consensus is building, have the potential to be responsible for the next great crash – and nobody knows what to do about it.
Howard Davies, then chairman of Britain’s Financial Services Authority (FSA), admitted in 2000 that hedge funds were not very well understood by policy-makers and regulators, but then added: “That is not astonishing in one sense, in that if we do not regulate it, we need know less about it. But it is clear that if we are interested in systemic stability, we cannot ignore a sector which can mobilise around the same volume of assets as the US commercial banking sector.”
