insight
工程技術，地產投資，信仰家園，時尚生活
"There's nothing wrong with a small crisis.
That's just normal for capitalism and a part of capitalism. Capitalism without crisis is not a good thing because it means it doesn't work. I think that's a little bit of what we have here. We have completely prevented capitalism from working in its natural way."
WHO doesn't like to have fun? Lars Christensen does. "Of course you should also have some fun," says the co-founder of investment bank Saxo Bank. "And for me, art is fun, politics is a little bit fun, ideology is fun, philosophy is fun, watching a football match is fun, having a beer with your friends is fun."
But wanting to do something is very different from having the means to do it.
"You should never forget that the foundation of all that fun is to have a good business," Mr Christensen says. "It's to have an economic foundation for your family, for your art, for going out with your friends. Without the economic foundation, you can't do any of those things. So you have to do them in the right order, so to speak."
Mr Christensen wears many hats. He is a political activist in his home country of Denmark, an entrepreneur, the co-chief executive of Saxo, a father of five, a collector of contemporary art and an amateur painter, as well as a self-professed philosopher.
But he is above all else a capitalist with a message: Free the markets.
"I'm a big believer in free markets," Mr Christensen says. "I think markets can take care of 99 per cent of any problem, right? And actually they do it very well, because if somebody has a stupid business model or something, the market will take care of it very quickly. But if you have a lot of regulatory and political involvement, political agendas, then the market stops working."
Market maker
The son of a teacher and a bank worker who grew up in the Danish countryside reckons he knows a little bit about markets. After moving to London in 1988 "with nothing but a bit of reading in the Financial Times", Mr Christensen joined a London brokerage as a commodity futures trader.
"One of the guys I had was a very good customer and we spoke every day, many times, on the phone, trading currencies," Mr Christensen says. "And we agreed to meet next time I was in Copenhagen. And this guy had an idea, he wanted to do his own broker. Actually I'd been thinking about the same thing, so we said OK, let's try it."
That customer was Kim Fournais, and the company they set up was Midas Fondsmaeglerselskab, which would eventually become Saxo, an international firm known for its early adoption of Internet trading and "white label" products that are made and run by Saxo but sold under third-party brands. Saxo now has offices in 24 countries, including Singapore, one of its largest operations outside of Europe.
"I'm a capitalist," Mr Christensen says. "I certainly don't mind making some money in the process, and there's a lot of nice things you can do with money, but it's not the only thing in life, and if somebody said, you know, 'I'll give you five times the money you have now but you can never work again', I wouldn't take it.
"I'm not eager to not work. I like working, and to me that's an important part of life. Money is more like a way to keep track of how you're doing, right? I believe very much that people should be free to pursue their dream, and in my view that's largely economic, right? It's about having economic foundation for having a good family life, for having a good personal life. I think that's the foundation of ... real freedom, so that you can actually build economic freedom. Because if you don't have money to feed your children, it doesn't really matter what other freedoms you have, right?"
Free market advocate
The belief that sound economics is the foundation of freedom, and that it is equivalent to free markets and market-driven policies, is what guides Mr Christensen.
Take the global financial crisis, for example. While some argue that a lack of regulation and aggressive action by central banks contributed to the credit crisis, Mr Christensen believes that there were actually too many distortionary rules in the first place.
"It was a lack of free markets that caused the crisis," he says. "If you had let the market react at a much earlier stage, if you had not kept interest rates deliberately and crazily low in some key central banks, you would have had a problem ... but these crises would have started and finished at a much earlier point than this gigantic crisis that you built up in this way. There's nothing wrong with a small crisis. That's just normal for capitalism and a part of capitalism. Capitalism without crisis is not a good thing because it means it doesn't work. I think that's a little bit of what we have here. We have completely prevented capitalism from working in its natural way."
It's no surprise that Mr Christensen frowns upon Keynesian stimulus as a way to smooth out business cycles - stimulus only masks the problems and allows the creation of even bigger bubbles further down the road, while a completely free market will self-cleanse through regular but smaller bubbles, he said.
His disdain for what he views to be regulatory interference goes even further. Take deposit insurance, for example. Many jurisdictions have some form of deposit insurance, on the belief that many consumers who put their savings with banks do not have the means and know-how to accurately access the credit strength of their financial institution. The systemic risk posed by bank runs is also severe enough that many governments feel it is acceptable to protect deposits, though the amount protected is often capped and banks have to pay for the insurance at a rate that reflects their credit quality.
Mr Christensen feels that such protections actually encourage risky behaviour among consumers. He cites the example of investors in Denmark hunting for banks that offered the best deposit interest rates and putting money in those banks, but only up to the insured limit. Depositors thus enjoy government-backed protection for their money as well as the higher interest rate offered by a risky bank, a mismatch between risk and return.
"You need to get more accountability," he says. "It's too risk-free to be a client today with the insurance deposit schemes and all that. I can understand that a workman doesn't understand banking, he should be able to trust his bank, right? I think that's fair enough.
"But I think there are too many people speculating in this ... These are not poor workmen who don't understand what's going on. These are specialised investors who put their money exactly at that limit in the most risky banks to maximise their returns and they're getting it from your taxpayer dollars, right? It's not a good system."
Mr Christensen is willing to make concessions in terms of regulations, however. Stricter capital requirements, for example, are positive, he acknowledges. And in general, rules that improve transparency are acceptable as well.
Contrarian
Mr Christensen will be the first to admit that only a minority shares his views, but he believes that the events of the past few years vindicate his stance.
"I think increasingly people will start thinking that way because it's very evident that the other thing doesn't work," he says. "If you look at the eurozone, you can see how desperately wrong everything goes. Eventually they will come around to see the need for more freedom, more pro-business, less public expenditure."
Europe, he ventures, should be a little less like Europe and a little more like Singapore.
"Forty years ago, when the economic growth really started in this country (Singapore), and as far as I remember, the Danish per-capita income was like three times what it was in Singapore at the time," he says.
"Today, 40 years later, it's gone from being a third of Danish income to being one-and-a-half times, right? So 40 years, this country, just by promoting an economic, pro-business policy, has exploded in wealth while we're standing still, right? To me, that's just policy. It's not like you have huge amounts of natural resources or huge amounts of stuff that nature has given you, right? You've just pursued policies that meant that we could be bothered to open an office here, that we could be bothered to hire 84 people here that pay taxes, and obviously we don't do that in North Korea, right?"
The businessman recalls that he was an initial supporter of the European Union, before more politically motivated policies like a common currency entered the picture.
"At the start, it was all about free markets, right? Nobody even talked about a common currency back then," he recalled.
"Denmark became a member in 1973, I can vaguely remember it, and at that time nobody talked about anything but free markets, right? And free trade. All the other stuff came later. Maybe that was the plan all the time, but nobody talked about it till later on, and then it's become a religion sometime in the '90s ... I'm now going from being positive to being neutral to being very sceptical to being very close to being a total opponent."
Though Mr Christensen's family now lives in Switzerland, he devotes much time to Danish politics as a key fund-raiser for the Liberal Alliance party, which advocates small government and market-driven policies.
"It's my fatherland, if you wish, it's my country," he explains. "But I never really saw this so much as a home because I've always been travelling a lot. I don't think it matters so much where you live, I think what matters is when you watch a football match, and you can feel who you really want to win, I think that's a more telling story."
He describes his political efforts as an attempt at correcting a fundamental wrong.
"I'm not really into politics to be a politician," he says. "I'm more into politics to limit the damage that politics causes to my country and that's why I feel the need to fight against it. It's not because I want to be the sheriff. I just want to have a little more freedom to allow business and personal freedom to prevail."
LARS SEIER CHRISTENSEN
Co-founder and co-CEO, Saxo Bank
1963 Born in Denmark
1988 Futures broker at Petley & Co, London
1989 Manager, Scandinavian desk, LIT Europe
1990 Manager, Scandinavian desk, Gerald Ltd
1992 Founded Saxo Bank
(Midas Fondsmaeglerselskab) with Kim Fournais
1995 to present Co-CEO, Saxo Bank
Married to Yvonne Christensen with five daughters
