It only makes sense, right? Personally i am quite pleased that the Germans lead this psychological warfare against the faceless 'markets', that are pushing more and more to funnel taxpayer's money in their ill-gone investments. As a greek, i find it ridiculous that the world's markets are turbulent over a tiny small country like Greece (the only PIGS country that is actually bankrupt), and exaggerate the risks so much. I do agree that markets have changed and it's time for a reform [What lessons have we learned from the 2008 crisis: None].
Have you ever thought twice about what exactly "faceless markets" are? Markets are composed of many agents, people, institutions, and mostly your pension money! It's true. Pension funds and other institutional investors are the single-largest segment, esp. of sovereign bond markets! Now ask yourself, with the Greek government in its current position, if it came to you today and asked you to lend it money, not to invest it in some thing or other but merely to pay back previous creditors, would you do it?! Yeah, me neither...
It's a copout by politicians and the bozos they represent to ascribe individual actions such as "pushing" or "punishing" etc. to aggregates like markets. But just as the laws on the molecular level do not simply reflect those on the subnuclear level of matter, the construct of "representative agents" is a fiction. Aggregation in the social sciences is just as hard and unintuitive as in the natural sciences, maybe even harder.
So why do they do it? Because to anthropomorphize "the market" allows them do demonize it, making things simple for the bozos in describing current developments as some kind of "struggle" between supposedly good central banks and politicians and evil, "faceless markets". Unfortunately, this type of rhetoric completely misframes the issues and leads invariably to wrong decisions by building political pressure at the wrong points in the system.
Markets are indeed composed of many agents, people and institutions squandering your pension money, all of whom hide behind the faceless market, arguing that if "the market" is doing it, it has to be right. Which is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place - everyone shirking off responsibility for their actions.
Does that mean that you should be forced to sell things for a price lower than you're willing to accept, or that you should be forced to buy things for a price higher than you're willing to pay?
Ah yes, the poor and irresponsible financiers have to take a haircut. Better that the Greek people should pay the price for a generation for little more than believing the lies their politicians told them to get elected, as they piled on the debt? If there were a way to wring a solution to this crisis out of those most responsible (Greek politicians) I would have us do it, but there isn't. So irresponsible lenders and irresponsible voters, and nations who perhaps irresponsibly guided Greece into the Euro in the first place, will have to share the burden. Sorry this doesn't jive with your Randian neo-libertarian bullshit ideas about how things actually work.
I fail to believe that markets serve the common good when the price of gold (a barely useful metal that on its own can't feed a single child) soares and also that the economic output of europe relies on greece. That's what the market would suggest. I'm not saying kill the markets, i just like rational markets. PSI invested in greek bonds (for 10 years now), for their own reasons, let them take the hit.
> Now ask yourself, with the Greek government in its current position, if it came to you today and asked you to lend it money, not to invest it in some thing or other but merely to pay back previous creditors, would you do it?! Yeah, me neither...
Absolutely not. Nobody rational would. That's the point.
>> [...] this psychological warfare against the faceless 'markets', that are pushing more and more to funnel taxpayer's money in their ill-gone investments.
> Have you ever thought twice about what exactly "faceless markets" are? Markets are composed of many agents, people, institutions, and mostly your pension money! It's true.
Yeah, so? They don't have to step up and ask for a loan. They just sit back in their masses and demand institutionalized theft to bail out their investments.
And why does it suddenly make things right that it's just regular people doing it?
Greece is simply the tip of the iceberg, the bit above the sea which you can see, whatever solution is eventually found for Greece will likely be taken as precedent for the rest of southern europe.
