June 26th, 2011 My work on the flawed nature of “mark-to-market” accounting and IFRS accounting standards has been included as supporting evidence in attempts by Steve Baker, the Conservative MP for Wycombe, to introduce to the UK parliament a private members bill that would transform how banks report their financial performance. Baker, a former Lehman [...]
June 26th, 2011 The patience of António Horta-Osório, the Portuguese-born boss of Lloyds Banking Group, appears to be wearing thin. According to a comment piece in the Sunday Telegraph, former Goldman Sachs and Santander banker has pleaded with executives from Lloyds and the former HBOS to stop hiding the truth from him. The paper’s business [...]
June 26th, 2011 In this RSA Animate, Professor David Harvey examines the causes of the global financial crisis and suggests it is time to look beyond capitalism towards a new social order that would allow us to live in a system that is responsible, just, and humane. Whilst I do not subscribe to Professor Harvey’s underlying Marxist conclusions [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: June 17th, 2011 Since Alex Salmond’s Scottish National Party secured a majority in Scotland’s parliamentary elections on May 5, there has been much debate about how well or badly an independent Scotland might fare. The debate both north and south of the border can be expected to get even more heated [...]
June 17th, 2011 Jim Rogers, the plain-speaking, Singapore-based investor, always talks sense about the debt blindness that continues to afflict the West. In this interview on CNN Money, Rogers tells Poppy Harlow: “Greece is bankrupt and the sooner we recognise that and do something about it the better … Eventually we’re going to have to bite [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: June 17th, 2011 The announcement from Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne (pictured above), that British banks are going to be forced to “ring fence” their retail and commercial banking (“utility”) activities from their investment banking (“casino”) activities has received wildy different receptions on either side of the Atlantic. [...]
June 15th, 2011 In this interview Ha-Joon Chang, author of 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, debunks pretty much all the myths of “free market capitalism”. These include the existence of “free markets” (all markets are regulated in some shape or form) and the necessity of “free trade” for the development of capitalism. [...]
June 10th, 2011 The myths of the rational investor and the efficient market hypothesis have much to answer for. Arguably, they underpinned the folly that was Alan Greenspan-ism, fuelling the insanity and fraudulence that overcame banking and financial markets ahead of the global financial crisis. I’ve always thought there are parallels between neo-liberal economists who peddled such [...]
June 10th, 2011 The credit rating agencies performed so woefully in the run-up to the global financial crisis, one might have thought they would be utterly discredited by now. One of the agencies most heinous mistakes was their rampant mislabeling of residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) in 2004-07. At the time, the rating [...]
June 1st, 2011 In wake of the resignation of “le seducteur extraordinaire” Dominique Strass-Kahn, we are in desperate need for some fresh thinking on Europe’s sovereign debt crisis. Yet the EU is determined to impose the French finance minister and former corporate lawyer Christine Lagarde as the IMF’s next boss (and she has been touring BRICs [...]