As the FT has reported today:
Considering it came less than two months after the last occasion when thousands of UBS shareholders assembled to hear about the Swiss banking group’s woes, Thursday’s special meeting in Lucerne held more information than might have been expected. The 2,395 investors gathered in a dingy suburban hall and heard for [...]
I appreciated John Kay’s article in the FT this morning, of only because I agree with much of it. He says:
Nationalised financial institutions have often been badly run businesses which served neither their owners nor their customers well. But recent experience has shown that privately owned financial institutions have often been badly run businesses which [...]
Search hard in the PBR and there is stuff worth reading. Take this:
The Government is also planning to reform the legislation governing cooperatives and credit unions. It will set out its further plans, including a response to consultation on the Act, in December 2008.
This is an essential counter-balance to the absurd situation we have got [...]
As the FT has reported:
The vehicle that funded Northern Rock’s ambitious expansion of mortgage lending has been cut loose by the state-run bank - a move that represents a shift in the wider world of mortgage finance.
The bank, advised by Credit Suisse, decided to let Granite, its £35.5bn securitisation programme or master trust, go into [...]
From the FT:
Non-executive directors contributed to the financial crisis by failing to challenge the management of many top banks, said Paul Myners, the UK’s City minister, as he urged institutional investors to take a bigger role in training and empowering corporate board members.
“We believe those boards need to be strengthened. Those boards were part of [...]
At least the government has seen sense and offered the Post Office network an essential lifeline by renewing the Post Office Card Account contract. Now it it time to move one. As New Economics Foundation director Stewart Wallis said in the Guardian this morning:
The Post Office must now be grown into a banking system built [...]
Bloomberg reports:
A top UBS AG official was indicted by a U.S. grand jury on one charge of conspiring to help 20,000 wealthy Americans hide assets from the Internal Revenue Service to maintain a “profitable” business for the Swiss bank.
Raoul Weil, 48, chairman of global wealth management at UBS in Zurich, was indicted Nov. 6 in [...]
There’s quite a debate going on regarding concerns Francine McKenna and I have raised regarding the problems of banks failing after Big 4 auditors issued unqualified audit reports on their accounts, implying that they thought them going concerns for the coming year.
So, let’s get some facts straight. For example, Lloyds TSB plc issued its 31.12.07 [...]
The FT has reported:
American Express became the latest financial group to convert to a bank holding company in a surprise move on Monday that will give the credit card group permanent access to Federal Reserve funds and could facilitate consolidation in the sector.
This is significant. Without the credit card companies (Amex, Visa and MasterCard, in [...]
