From FT Alphaville:
Have you ever heard of Inter-Alpha? We hadn’t until this weekend, although we tend not to frequent the conspiracy sites that lump it in alongside the world’s Bilderbergs, Rothschilds, and the Stonecutters.
It is a group of banks that meet together to, erm, discuss stuff, but there’s no conspiracy. The truth is that Inter-Alpha’s list of members, are much, much more intriguing than that.
It’s basically a strong SELL list of European banks that’s been cleverly masquerading for years as an ‘ideas and experience’ talking shop:
See what we mean? What a coincidence of names. Put those in your pension portfolio and weep.
Inter-Alpha isn’t a conspiracy, or a talking shop. Inter-Alpha is like a bizarre nexus of everything — and we mean everything — that went wrong in European banking 2005-10, from subprime to sovereigns.
Consider this annotated list of Inter-Alpha member achievements:
Commerzbank — Subprime exposure, disastrous acquisition, 2008 blow-up, government capital injection, peripheral exposure*...MORE
