September 29th, 2011 It’s incredible how some journalists got it so wrong about the City of London just prior to the crash of 2007-09. In January 2007 Time Magazine’s Adam Smith wrote an unctuous feature about the Square Mile which lavished praise on Gordon Brown’s “light touch” approach to financial regulation. In his second paragraph, [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: September 28th, 2011 Why does anyone rely on ‘sellside’ research? The investment analysts who produce it, for free, tend to work for investment banks that also have some very big ticket services to sell, such as the underwriting of IPOs, to the very companies whose performance they are supposed [...]
September 27th, 2011 There has been much speculation that the “trader” who appeared on the BBC News channel yesterday may be prankster, and perhaps even a member of the Yes Men. If true, this would be a huge embarrassment for the BBC. Self-styled “independent trader” Alessio Rastani created quite a stir with yesterday’s astonishing interview, [...]
September 23rd, 2011 By Chandran Nair The extreme form of capitalism which has permeated the world, particularly in the last 30-40 years, is in deep trouble and we are in denial. It is important to understand that fundamental principles of capitalism – that human beings are rational and markets behave rationally, and that markets will [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: September 22nd, 2011 The gigantic $2.3 billion losses that Union Bank of Switzerland is blaming on a Ghanaian-born “rogue” trader have added power to the elbows of all those who believe that “casino” banking ought to be completely separated from “utility” banking and should never be underwritten by the taxpayer. UBS, [...]
September 22nd, 2011 The Occupy Wall Street protests, which kicked off last Saturday, have been derided as an irrelevance by the likes of Nathalie Rothschild in Spiked, and largely ignored by the mainstream media. I accept that the turnout has been much lower than predicted and that some of the protestors are whimsical youngsters who seem somewhat [...]
September 20th, 2011 Royal Bank of Scotland spends over £200 million a year on legal fees and employs some of the finest legal minds in the UK. But this hasn’t stopped the bailed-out institution from entering something of a losing wicket in court in recent months. In January 2010, RBS was slated for lacking “candour” in Carlyle vs [...]
September 15th, 2011 Ex-UBS trader Shaun Richards has come up with an interesting theory of what went wrong at UBS’s Delta One unit, whose trader Kweku Adoboli was arrested at 3.30am this morning and I believe remains in custody. Richards believes that the Swiss bank got caught with its trousers down when the Swiss central [...]
September 15th, 2011 So after Nick Leeson and Jerôme Kerviel, it seems that another ‘rogue’ trader is about to enter the annals of banking infamy. This time it’s the turn of the Nottingham University-educated market maker, Kweku Adoboli. Adoboli, a 31-year old trader in the bank’s City of London-based exchange-traded funds business, was arrested on [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: September 14th, 2011 The Independent Banking Commission was established by the UK’s coalition government in June 2010 as a means of kicking a thorny and divisive issue into the long grass. At the time, the divisions within the coalition government over what to do about the UK’s bloated and dysfunctional banking sector were [...]