Aleš Michl's greed

In today's print edition of the Financial Times, CNB Gov. Aleš Michl talks about plowing billions of euros of foreign reserves into bitcoin. "I used to run an investment fund," he tells the newspaper, "so I'm a typical investment banker, I would say. I like profitability." Three pages later in today's FT, retired fund manager Bill Gross writes about the responsibility that goes along with managing money and says that when "irrationality or greed get the upper hand - as they did in the U.S. savings & loans crisis in the late 1980s, or perhaps with the dotcom bubble and now the bitcoin bubble - markets, economies and people can be damaged for years." Michl acknowledged to the FT that he's taking a big risk with bitcoin and that the CNB might lose its entire investment. As we noted in Nov., he's also gambling heavily on the stock market instead of returning to Czechs the value that the CNB took from them in the devaluation. In Michl's case, the adage about pride could be rephrased: Greed before the fall.