April 21st, 2011 In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the 635-page report prepared by Senator Carl Levin’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations into the causes of the financial crisis. Among other things the report alleges that New York-based investment bank Goldman Sachs, known as the giant vampire squid [...]
April 20th, 2011 The High Court in London has today ruled that UK banks must compensate millions of people who they ripped off by selling them often useless payment protection insurance (PPI). In the video Martin Lewis, founder of Money Saving Expert, accuses the banks of behaving “disgustingly” throughout the PPI scandal, and urges consumers to check whether [...]
April 19th, 2011 I actually missed this. I was already inside the Royal Bank of Scotland annual general meeting when Kit Fraser (no relation), who is standing for election to the Scottish Parliament for the Ban Bankers’ Bonuses Party, stripped to his boxer shorts outside the entrance to the RBS conference centre. It is all part [...]
April 15th, 2011 This episode from Anderson Cooper’s 360° from CNN makes it clear why investment bankers and people in ratings agencies, among others, should be prosecuted for their role in causing the global financial crisis. In the programme the Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi and former New York State governor Eliot Spitzer explain the [...]
April 15th, 2011 By Richard Murphy Glencore International, the world’s largest commodity trader, is to be floated on the stock exchange. The markets are going wild. Another Swiss recluse brings their shares to the market. Glencore is, as the Guardian reports, subject to a complaint from five NGOs that have filed a complaint to the Organisation for [...]
April 15th, 2011 FairPensions has produced an excellent, in-depth report which lifts the lid on the conflicts of interest at the heart of pensions management and calls on institutional investors to shape up their act by adopting what it calls an “enlightened fiduciary” model. Under the FairPensions proposals, launched at an event attended by government [...]
April 8th, 2011 When prime minister Jose Socrates formally requested a bailout for Portugal on April 6, it left just two of the five PIIGS countries standing. While the details of Portugal’s expected €80bn facility from the EFSF have yet to be hammered out, it left only Italy and Spain still able to refinance their sovereign [...]
April 4th, 2011 By Charles Hugh Smith The “fixes” of conventional economics such as Keynesian stimulus will all fail catastrophically within the next 10 years. The next decade will see the complete failure of conventional economics. Why is this so? If we take the very long view, we find that all of conventional economics developed [...]
April 4th, 2011 Will Hopper, co-author with his brother Kenneth of the excellent The Puritan Gift, (a book which among other things calls for a return to the form of capitalism prevalent in US in the 1950s and 1960s, in which shareholders’ interests were balanced with those of staff, customers, suppliers and society at large) had a [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: April 3rd, 2011 A LEADING Highland firm of chartered accountants and tax advisers is facing bankruptcy following a lengthy dispute with the state-owned lender Royal Bank of Scotland. Graeme Fraser, who founded 16-strong Graeme M Fraser & Co in the early 1980s, will appear as a ‘party litigant’ [...]