*
The time had come for a division of the spoils: Greece had lost and the moment for the carve-up of its assets had arrived. After an unequal battle the victors dictated their terms in a treaty that set out the sequester of public assets to the tune of fifty billion euros. A massive fire sale that included the privatisation of infrastructure such as sea ports, airports, utilities, transport and logistic systems, all to be sold off to foreign bidders in order to secure a new bailout of eighty six billion euros.
Amongst the first assets on the block of the ambitious privatisation programme was a network of regional airports, the most profitable of which were those of the islands of Mykonos and Santorini, ceded in a fifty year concession to the German operator of Frankfurt International Airport, owned by the German Federal and Regional authorities.
It was a grim warning to Europe and all those who chose, like the Greeks, to vote for corrupt self-interested politicians and parties concerned only by their own short term survival.
MARKETS AND COMMUNISM
“I regret to tell you Pat, China has become one big casino,” Kennedy’s father-in-law told him. “Even people in the smallest towns and villages are buying and selling shares. Can you imagine that, even peasants, as Mao liked to call our small holders. Some people in Canton and Shanghai have even turned it into a full time job.”
“Yes sir,” Pat replied respectfully.
“When old men like me give up mahjong to bet on the market you can be sure trouble is brewing.”
It was nothing new to Pat, but to hear it from the horses mouth was. Kennedy had seen it all before, it reminded him of Dublin in 2008, when taxis drivers and barbers had bragged of the profits made from their property investments. Suddenly millions of Chinese from every walk of life were being drawn into a speculative stock market frenzy.
“Did you know the first thing they do when they wake up is check the market? Then they spend the rest of the day on their phones following the board, when they are eating, working and even in the metro or in their car. Believe me when I say they dream of flashing screens,” he said greatly amused at the thought.
The wise players were those who had got in first, a year earlier, and got out after racking up substantial gains, and as usual it was the late comers who paid the price as the bulls gave way to bears.
It was a far cry from Deng Xiaoping’s timid steps towards a market economy and another universe compared to that of Mao’s Revolutionary China. Hardy Communist peasants had been replaced by the kind of wide eyed punters who could be seen at the tables of Macau hanging on the turn of a card or a roll of the dice.
They were ordinary Chinese, drawn by the mirage of easy gains, those who had forgotten Communism, that is if they had ever believed in it. What attracted them was the lure of quick money and what they could buy with it. For the two or more decades years the Chinese had watched a frenzy of construction: offices, appartments and shopping malls, which instilled in them a feverish desire to get rich, by any means, and quick.
“Let me tell you a story Pat. Last year I was in Paris with my friends. What did they want to see apart from the Eiffel Tower? Galleries Lafayette! Shops, shops and more shops! Of course it is complicated for them, they don’t speak English or French, they know nothing of European history, but they do know how to shop.
“We Chinese have only done what we have been told to do. Take the stock market, the state-run news media with its euphoric headlines, urged ordinary ordinary people to rush into the market and in doing so they have contributed to this bubble.
“Brokerage firms have made it so easy to open an account that nearly forty million were opened in second quarter of this year, that’s compared to nine million in all of 2014, can you believe that?”
It was a fact, the same brokerage firms had allowed their offices to be transformed into meeting places, almost like social clubs, where punters could chat, exchange tips and tell stories. Every day they cheered the closing bell as markets in Shanghai, Shenzhen or Hong Kong reach new highs. They learnt nothing from the 2008 crash when the Shanghai composite dropped seventy percent.
“You see we Chinese are inveterate gamblers. Did you read Lu Xun’s novel Shanghai Morning? Well it was exactly the same in the 1930s.”
Pat nodded, he had already read the long novel his father-in-law had given him, the Chinese and English versions, at least in part, enough to understand little had changed on the Shanghai Bund in three quarters of a century.
“Small investors were encouraged by reports in The People’s Daily, which encouraged people to put their money into shares with reports of remote villagers investing in shares,” he grimly told Kennedy. “Now those unfortunate villagers and millions of others are crying in their rice bowls, some bet their life savings and others lost their homes.”
Cornucopia Page 103