Yanis Varoufakis Wiktor Dabkowski/ZUMA Wire

The Varoufakis Effect?

Investors should be worried nowadays – very worried – about political risk. But they must also be wary of financial analysts who are either incapable of, or uninterested in, distinguishing between causality and correlation, and between insolvency and illiquidity.

ATHENS – In his end-of-2015 missive, Holger Schmieding of the Hamburg investment bank Berenberg warned his firm’s clients that what they should be worrying about now is political risk. To illustrate, he posted the diagram below, showing how business confidence collapsed in Greece during the late spring of 2015, and picked up again only after my resignation from the finance ministry. Schmieding chose to call this the “Varoufakis effect.”

There is no doubt that investors should be worried – very worried – about political risk nowadays, including the capacity of politicians and bureaucrats to do untold damage to an economy. But they must also be wary of analysts who are either incapable of, or uninterested in, distinguishing between causality and correlation, and between insolvency and illiquidity. In other words, they must be wary of analysts like Schmieding.

Business confidence in Greece did indeed plummet a few months after I became Finance Minister. And it did pick up a month after my resignation. The correlation is palpable. But is the causality?

https://prosyn.org/RN9l351