The French government declares war on bank speculation. Pierre Moscovici, the French finance minister, presented, in fact, yesterday, a bill that aims to reform banking institutions by separating activities useful to the economy from simple speculative operations, "useless to the country's economy", which will have to be entrusted by the banks to branch offices.
Above all, they end up in the crosshairs of the Hollande government speculation on agricultural commodity derivatives and high-frequency trading (Hft), which allows, thanks to highly technological algorithms, to carry out millions of orders via computer in a very short time, exploiting the minimum price differences of the same stock.
The accusations that hang over the head of this speculative mechanism are those of excessively favoring the major operators over ordinary investors, in addition to the risk, always lurking, of provoking incidents such as the Dow Jones flash crash on May 6, 2010.
The veto to the Hft will be passed to the scrutiny of the council of ministers to be held on 19 December, but it is already receiving the first criticisms, above all from institutes such as Société Générale and Bnp Paribas (the only two French banks that claim to practice high-frequency trading), concerned above all by the possible inequality that a measure in this direction would create against American banking institutions, which will be able to continue to act freely.
