The Barclays Bank fiasco, of it accepting an offer of funding from Middle East investors at an interest rate of 14%, at a tax cost to the UK government of £120 million a year, all as an alternative to lower cost, better term UK government finance, is astonishing. So too is the fact that they [...]
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 [...]
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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 [...]
I’m going to be cautious here, as there may be real differences that explain this story, but the FT has reported that (and I’ve edited this down, a lot):
Carnegie, the Nordic region’s oldest and largest investment bank, was taken over by the Swedish government on Monday after its licence was revoked for failures in its [...]
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I’m amazed. The Monetary Policy Committee have cut interest rates in the last few minutes by 1.5% to a new rate of 3%. In doing so they proved two things. First of all, they can ignore their inflation remit. I have no doubt they did. Second, they are not independent. This body was not inclined [...]
Just look at this roll call of failure.
Well rewarded failure.
And then you’ll know why Gordon Brown is wrong to trust a banker to lead the bail out of banks in the UK.
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From the FT:
One of Goldman Sachs’s flagship hedge funds, run by two of the Wall Street bank’s most talented traders, has lost close to $1bn since its launch in January in further evidence of the crisis facing the industry.
Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, which was hailed in January as one of the biggest hedge fund launches, [...]
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