By Ian Fraser
Published: Sunday Herald
Date: December 28th, 2008
Ian Fraser tells the story of how Scotland’s reputation for finance was destroyed by imperialistic bosses, toothless regulators and ‘deeply culpable’ non-executives.
THE DAY of reckoning for Scotland’s once proud and swaggering bankers came on Monday, October 13. This was the day that the prime minister announced his £37 [...]
By Ian Fraser
Published: Sunday Herald
Date: December 28th, 2008
Image courtesy of Greenwich Mean Time
THE wall of cheap credit that banks lavished on the UK property sector between 2001 and 2007, combined with their customers’ proclivity to borrow, caused huge distortions in the property market.
Bubbles expanded in both the residential and commercial sectors of the market, further [...]
December 21st, 2008
Charming guy, Andy Hornby. But would you trust him with your money?
If you’re interested in reading a bit more about his amazingly responsible stewardship of HBOS, just click on the links. However, when doing so it is worth remembering who it was who set HBOS on its path towards self-destruction – Hornby’s predecessor, [...]
December 20th, 2008
Bernie Madoff, the most successful fraudster of all time, is captured on film explaining how Wall Street sophisticates are able to run rings around the regulators. The clip is from a roundtable discussion filmed in October 2007. Among other things, the swindler extraordinaire – who, more than anything else, has revealed the hollowness [...]
December 20th, 2008
The Bay City Rollers; image from So Me Cool Cats – Le Blog
Over the past three months, Robert Peston has been a bit too close to the Treasury, Lloyds TSB and HBOS for my liking — as I’ve already alluded to elsewhere (see Sir George on Robert Peston and Peston’s credibility open to [...]
December 19th, 2008
ROWAN Williams may not be everybody’s cup of tea.
He was given a rough ride by the media earlier this year over his suggestion that aspects of Sharia Law could be incorporated into UK civil law. He also came close to presiding over the disintegration of the ‘Anglican Communion’ over issues of gender and [...]
December 17th, 2008
An amazing mea culpa appeared on the SEC website yesterday.
The former Republican congressman Christopher Cox, who has been in the hot seat as chairman of the Securities & Exchange Commission since 2005, has admitted that the Washington-based Commission screwed up big time over Bernie Madoff’s $50bn Ponzi scheme.
He said the initial findings of [...]
December 15th, 2008
It beggars belief that so many supposedly ’sophisticated’ investors allowed themselves to be hoodwinked by Bernie Madoff, the former chairman of Nasdaq, who is likely to go down in history as one of the most successful fraudsters of all time.
Banks and professional investors including the Royal Bank of Scotland (£400m down), Santander (€2.33bn [...]
December 12th, 2008
HOWARD Brown, the Halifax teller-turned-minor celebrity, risks crippling his new steed, Lloyds TSB’s black horse, with his cavalier riding style.
HBOS’s trading update this morning is scary stuff. In what appears to be an exercise in “kitchen sinking”, HBOS has revealed that its balance sheet is in a far more perilous state than previously [...]
By Ian Fraser
Published: Sunday Herald
Date: November 30th, 2008
BUSINESS customers of HBOS’s Bank of Scotland Corporate division in Southeast England claim that a former bank manager working alongside Quayside Corporate Services jeopardised their businesses – which in many cases went to the wall.
Business customers from across Southeast England were referred to the bank’s “mid market, high [...]