By Kenny Kemp Published: Sunday Herald Date: May 29th, 2011 A Church of Scotland leader has branded the new Heart of Midlothian strip sponsor, Wonga.com, as “immoral”. The London-based finance firm, founded by South African-born entrepreneur Errol Damelin in 2006, has already been labelled as “ethically bankrupt” and usurious by the Harvard Business Review. The firm [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: May 29th, 2011 FSA demands raise capital cost of acquisition, while Sir Richard Branson say he expects to bid for 600-plus network. By Ian Fraser Clydesdale Bank has lost its leading position in the race to acquire the 600-plus branches that Lloyds Banking Group has to sell, as [...]
May 27th, 2011 Terry Smith, the pugnacious founder of London-based asset management group Fundsmith, has launched a broadside at the exchange-traded funds sector, arguing that it is an accident waiting to happen for investors and asking whose neck(s) will get broken as a result of its “breakneck” growth. Smith is a City of London veteran famous [...]
May 25th, 2011 I love these Econstories rap fights between John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich August Hayek — and if you listen carefully the words are extremely well done, with the scripts clearly crafted by someone who understands economics. Is more intervention-ism or another dose of neo-liberal free marketeering the solution to the world’s economic [...]
May 22nd, 2011 Even several days after the story first broke, the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair beggars belief. One of the most powerful men in the world, on whose input it is argued the very future of eurozone depends — and someone who could easily have become the next president of France – stands accused of sexually [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Financial Times Date May 23rd, 2011 As Antonio Horta-Osório, chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group, weighs up whether or not to sell Scottish Widows Investment Partnership, the bank’s asset management arm, the consensus in the City is that he should plump for a sale. He is due to announce the decision [...]
May 17th, 2011 Matt Taibbi, the Rolling Stone journalist who famously dubbed Goldman Sachs a “great vampire squid” in a seminal article published in July 2009, recently wrote another about the New York-based investment bank (The People vs. Goldman Sachs). Writing on Clusterstock, Henry Blodget, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Business Insider, said this one is “potentially [...]
May 16th, 2011 The surprise arrest last Saturday of the IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn at Kennedy airport in New York on sex charges could not have come at a worse time for international financial markets. Rather than dwell on innocence, guilt or the detail of the offences of the former French finance minister is alleged [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: May 15th, 2011 Lloyds Banking Group is facing a protest vote from investors against the £13.4m package and generous pension awarded to chief executive Antonio Horta-Osorio at its annual general meeting in Glasgow this Wednesday. The bank’s board is also expected to face a barrage of criticism from [...]
By: Matt Taibbi Published: Rolling Stone Date: May 26th, 2011 A Senate committee has laid out the evidence. Now the Justice Department should bring criminal charges They weren’t murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. [...]