BBC – In much of continental Europe, there’s a widespread belief that hedge funds and private equity firms caused the global economic crisis.
Which is presumably one reason why the European Commission wants much tighter regulation of both the hedgies and the buyout boys.
I’ve had personal experience of this, in a recent interview for French telly on how to prevent a repetition of the disaster: more-or-less all my interlocutor wanted to discuss was the alleged imperative of constraining the activities of hedge funds; there wasn’t even a nod at the reality that far more of the real culprits were in the banks, including French banks.
