Nitin Desai: Casino capitalism
For a little under a year now, the world economy has been shaken by the turmoil in financial markets set off by the sub-prime crisis. Horst Kohler, a former head of the IMF and now the President of Germany, criticised the international finance industry about a month ago and questioned whether the rapid growth of this industry, the exotic financial products that it purveys and the huge incomes that its managers take home, reflect a genuinely-useful contribution to the global economy.
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