Time and again I am asked to believe that bankers have changed their spots and that we live in a new era of ethical financial services. Time and again I have difficulty doing so, and for good reason.
I still see th UK's tax havens resisting calls for public registers of companies. Secrecy remains top of their agenda as a result.
I still see Jersey promoting 'research' claiming they add value to the world economy.
And well after 2008 we now learn that Lloyds Bank was doing its best to abuse the government scheme set up to help bail it out through the deliberate rigging of interest rate data to save itself money.
Mark Carney has expressed his anger at this activity, and rightly so. But he needs to take his blinkers off. The reality is that nothing has really changed in the City, or in its tax haven branch offices. The fact that Lloyds, despite its dominant government stake in its capital, continued with a culture where abuse was possible and considered acceptable is the surest indication of that. The bankers have carried on as before, running the banks for the bankers and not in anyone else's interests and the failure to use state ownership as the point of leverage for change is as a result a damning indictment of the failure of Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling to impose control and so change on those banks when they had the chance to do so.
Osborne's banking reforms will not happen before 2018 - itself an indication of business as usual. I am not hearing of any major changes being proposed by Labour. As Aditya Chakrabortty says this morning in a powerful article in the Guardian, all Labour says is that we need to address market failure with more competition from new banks that will do exactly the same thing as those banks already in existence - and this is not a recipe for change as a result but is instead support for the status quo.
We have made some progress - but not enough by among way - on tax transparency over the last few years. But real reform of the corrupt nature of our banking system is a long way off right now. Expect the abuse and the scandals to continue, because no one seems willing to tackle them.
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Are we in 2012 or 2014 now?
How many people were involved in these latest (totally unjustifiable) activities…
You think the banks have changed since 2012
Politely, pull the other one
Inconvenient, are you trying to say that banking has cleared up its act now? Do you not ubderstand what this represents, that a bank rescued by taxpayers’ money actually committed fraud to ensure the money it paid back under the SLS was less than it should have been?
To quote: “But much of the focus was on the impact on the Bank’s emergency funding scheme. Owen Watkins, barrister in the corporate team at Lewis Silkin, said: “This is effectively a fraud on the taxpayer as the SLS was a taxpayer-backed measure.”
What moral universe do you and other right wingers inhabit? I suggest you take a look at this blog, by a former Fraud Squad officer, before you start trying to defend the City.
http://rowans-blog.blogspot.com/
sick of tax dodgers-I read your link, informative but depressing.
I went on the Guardian today and read the comments on Poly Tonybee’s article. There were a number of posts deriding her and Richard. One comment ‘the man’s a joke’. There are, sadly, plenty of people who seem unable to imagine there is any other way to see the world than they do or use any argument to discredit those who challenge these who abuse their power.
I think Polly is one of those who rather wisely does not read her comments
I never do when I publish on CiF. It’s not worth it. I think most regular commentators share that view
How predictable and pathetic, someone responding to my post questioning the “morality of right-wingers”, when all I’ve done is emphasize that claiming a 2 year old incident, implemented by just a handful of people is hardly strong evidence to support the claim from the blog that ‘nothing has changed’ in the industry…
(But of course that wouldn’t fit with the rhetoric… Much better to listen to someone with an axe to grind and a blog to advertise rather than those who actually work in the industry,,,
In my original post I even emphasised that these activities were “totally unjustified”, yet you question how I can ‘defend the City’…
Sometimes a ‘facepalm’ is insufficient to respond to posts of this nature.
Respectfully, we know that this type of activity was not isolated. We know it was systemic and likely to have been known about by senior management.
The embarrassment should be all yours for even thinking of using the proverbial ‘rotten apples’ argument when it was so clearly absurd to do so
As ever, what you claim (what you think you know) and what is actually the truth are very different:
How many people are employed in banking?
How many people do you think were involved in this type of activity?!!
The issue is not how many
Very clearly the majority were not
It is that it happened and was widely known to have happened
Blip UT you just don’t get that
Richard
Once again you seek to misrepresent what your opponents are saying.
Who is denying what happened in the past!
What is clear is that pointing to something that happened at one bank over 2 years ago does not support your claims about the current practices in the wider industry.
As usual, pretending you are an expert on everything (when you clearly have very limited experience of much of what you talk about) is unhelpful and unnecessary.
I make no pretence to be an expert on everything. Indeed, I declined to do a radio interview on banking this morning for that reason
But, my hypothesis is that banking has not changed post crash, and it clearly has not
It does not take rocket science to realise that
But there is also another issue at play here: your language suggests only the super specialised my comment. That means competition is suppressed and the status quo is maintained. That is, of course, you aim
I reject your definition of specialism as a result. My specialism, if I have one, is in spotting flaws in the status quo
Inconvenient, I would have thought that the fact this latest (in a long line of course) City scandal, taking place 4 years AFTER the Financial Crash, and to top it all, in one of the bailed out banks, is proof of the fact that, in large parts of the City, nothing has changed. So Richard’s point stands.
If there are only a handful of wrongdoers, why is the BoE now proposing new legislation concerning the clawing back of bonuses, and jail sentances for reckless behaviour?
You dismiss Rowan’s blog as being that of someone with an axe to grind, and a blog to promote: with respect, given that you say you work in the City, you have a vested interest in trying to defend it, and to try to dismiss what he says by accusing him of promoting it is ridiculous. Don’t you think he might be doing this because he is, as a former policeman, genuinely angry at what he found?
Entirely agree that Labour’s proposal for more competition is not the answer: you don’t reform a cartel by increasing its membership. Moreover, the very word “competition” implies that there actually is a free market; but it doesn’t exist in the various privatised monopolies and cartels, whose only goal appears to be to channel ever more money to themselves.
Next someone will be suggesting that we actually have democracy….
Is this not a good idea then.
http://news.sky.com/story/1309490/bankers-face-worlds-longest-bonus-clawbacks
It feels like a token rather than a real change
“Inconvenient, I would have thought that the fact this latest (in a long line of course) City scandal, taking place 4 years AFTER the Financial Crash, and to top it all, in one of the bailed out banks, is proof of the fact that, in large parts of the City, nothing has changed. So Richard’s point stands.”
Not when this scandal is at just one bak and stems from more than 2 years ago.
“If there are only a handful of wrongdoers, why is the BoE now proposing new legislation concerning the clawing back of bonuses, and jail sentances for reckless behaviour?”
How many people do you think this will affect?
“You dismiss Rowan’s blog as being that of someone with an axe to grind, and a blog to promote: with respect, given that you say you work in the City, you have a vested interest in trying to defend it, and to try to dismiss what he says by accusing him of promoting it is ridiculous. Don’t you think he might be doing this because he is, as a former policeman, genuinely angry at what he found?”
I was referring to Richard ‘s blog, not Rowan’s blog.
I have no doubt that in an industry employing over 2 million people in the UK, there will be some issues / scandals to be brought to the public attention. The vast majority of those working in financial services are honest and hard working and have seen positive changes over the last few years. Of course many institutions already had a strong ethical culture well before the crash.
We know that there are scandals caused by individuals in many aspects of the public sector – the NHS, teaching, the police, local government etc. However, Richard doesn’t try and pretend that this means those institutions are entirely corrupt and cast aspersions on all of those working in those sectors.
I guess he is funded by public sector unions,so wouldn’t, would he….
You are now abusing the comments policy
Further comment of similar sort will be deleted. You are obviously not seeking to contribute to debate with comments like these
WTF?
I am responding to another poster, correcting his misunderstanding and misrepresentation of my position and his lack of understanding.
Respectfully, ad hominem attacks on me are nowhere near what you describe
You joined the automatically deleted list
Yesterday a man was jailed for 9 years for conning people out of more than £100,000.
The builder undertook shoddy and substandard home repairs and then overcharged his customers.
How different is this case to the behaviour of many financial firms who tell their clients blatant lies and rob them of their life savings?
Inconvenient, firstly, please note that I am not attacking you personally, nor am I doubting your assertion that a lot of the lower level people working in the City are honest.
My point was that the culture in the City, a culture set by the top management and ‘deal makers’ and brokers, motivated by the pursuit of profit and bonuses at all costs, has led to fraud and catastrophic mismanagement, and the latest scandal at Lloyds is yet more evidence of this culture.
It’s not a question of the proposed legisaltion affecting large numbers of people, it’s the effect it will (hopefully) have on those whose reckless behaviour led to the financial crash. They are the kind of people that Rowan was talking about in his blog, which you apparently haven’t read. I suggest you do; it makes for sobering reading, and does not present the movers and shakers of the City in a good light.
Attacking Richard for having a blog to promote and being funded by public sector unions? Hey ho, the usual response of the right to criticism, playing the man, and not the ball.
As for your comment about the public sector, can I point out that the occasional scandal in parts of the public sector a) hasn’t caused anything like the damage caused by the financial crisis, and b) its people in the public sector who’ve been forced to pay for the mess caused by the City in the form of pay freezes, lower pensions and worse working conditions.
Morale, as a result, is getting worse and worse. Long serving public sector employees resent being made to pay for something they didn’t cause, something caused by people on salaries many times higher than theirs.