Three Monkeys Online - the free current affairs & arts magazine

Witold Gadomski has a lengthy article on the crisis in Saturday’s Gazeta Wyborcza. It’s a tremendously boring article about the central bank, the bank oversight commission and some elected jerk who picks up a pay cheque for punching the clock at the ministry for finance every day. A big problem is that the important offices (the national bank and the oversight commission) are staffed by people who have not yet quite won the trust of the bankers. One of them (name forgotten) is a good solid worker but – again – he has not yet won the trust of the bankers. If he had won the trust of the bankers there would be no problem: banks would happily lend money to each other, just as they used to do when there was a man on the job who had won the trust of the bankers. It’s worse in the national bank. The man in charge there (Skrzypek) simply does not have the trust of the bankers. He is opposed to Poland changing its currency to the euro, or in other words, he does not have the trust of the bankers. He’s independent of the government but could he perhaps be just a little - a tiny bit - too independent – I mean after all, this is a man who doesn’t even have the trust of the bankers.

Yes, it is monotonous, isn’t it? Constantly being told in a not very well disguised way that the people who monitor and regulate the banking industry should be bankers. Because we all trust bankers, don’t we?

The papers the other day reported that the Baltic countries are in serious trouble. The crisis has hit them harder than it has Poland. Latvia’s economy contracted 4.2% in one quarter. I patiently await a rash of articles highly critical of the flat tax which the Baltic countries embraced in the 90s. Patiently waiting… Waiting patiently…

Their problems in the Baltic countries are not all that new. In 2007 they were worried about high inflation but there was little they could do because they had pegged their currencies to the euro and could not do anything about the interest rates in the eurozone, which are determined by Jean-Claude Trichet.