Financial Times
November 8, 2011
Mention role playing and most adults cringe with childhood memories of Dungeons & Dragons or excruciating team-bonding sessions. But it can also be used by investors in the form of “confrontation analysis” such as that organised by former military analyst Mike Young’s Decision Workshops. I took part in a session on Greece and the euro this week, with Germany playing the dragon and Greece consigned to a dungeon.
Even with what is going on in Europe, the outcome was extreme. In what might be dubbed a Napoleonic solution, Greece was in effect taken out and shot, pour encourager les autres. Germany’s desire for austerity in the periphery could then be enforced merely by pointing at the post-default economic collapse in Greece. Meanwhile, the European Central Bank would have to print trillions of euros to prevent contagion.
This is not a likely scenario, not least because of the danger that the ECB action fails to prevent deep depression.
Yet, it was revealing for all that. Similar, if less structured, discussions among investors are considering possibilities that five years ago would have been dismissed out of hand.
More
No comments:
Post a Comment