March 12th, 2010 Picture: Uzar News Poland Guess which taxpayer-owned banks in the UK are helping Trafigura — the oil trading company which illegally dumped 500 tonnes of hazardous waste, causing a public health emergency in the Ivory Coast — to raise millions of euros on the bond markets? You guessed it. The taxpayer-owned Royal [...]
March 12th, 2010 One of the most stunning revelations to come out of the Court Appointed Examiner’s Report into the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, published online last night, was that the New York-based investment bank was unable to find a US-based law firm prepared to sign off its at best deceptive and at worst fraudulent [...]
March 7th, 2010 A fascinating insight into the reading habits of Reuters’s prolific financial blogger Felix Salmon has been published by Atlantic Wire (part of Atlantic Monthly Group). The column also touches on how he spends his working days. Felix may not realise it, but he gives away some valuable trade secrets in the piece [...]
March, 2nd, 2010 Governments around the world have been massaging their own balance sheets and disguising their true liabilities for years. In this interview with the Huffington Post, Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’s chief economics commentator sheds light on the scale of the problem — and its repercussions. He also lets US investment bank Goldman [...]
March 2nd, 2010 What’s going on at RBS Wealth, the division of state-owned Edinburgh-based Royal Bank of Scotland Group that caters to the needs of wealthier customers through brands like the Queen’s bankers, Coutts & Co, and the comparative Scottish upstart, Adam & Company? Apart from anything else, isn’t it incongruous that a government which [...]
March 2nd, 2010 Legendary Omaha-based investor Warren Buffett often uses his annual letter to shareholders in Berkshire Hathaway group to impart some homespun financial wisdom and disseminate a few trade secrets. The letter accompanying the conglomerate’s 2009 annual report, released on Saturday, doesn’t disappoint. Perhaps Buffett’s most pertinent recommendation, concerns the corporate governance of large [...]
March 2nd, 2010 Goldman Sachs likes to think of itself as being so smart it is invincible, but the truth is somewhat different. The New York-based investment bank would probably not be around today had it not been for the US government’s decision to bail out AIG in the panicked few days following Lehman Brothers’ [...]