October 30th, 2011 Calls for a radical rethink of the political and economic system from the “HBOS whistleblower”, Paul Moore, could not have come at a more appropriate time. Moore — who was personally fired by HBOS chief executive Sir James Crosby in November 2004 after seeking to warn the bank’s board that its sales-mad [...]
October 25th, 2011 Sir Steve Robson (pictured right), was a non-executive director on the board of the Royal Bank of Scotland at the time it blew up. Overall Sir Steve, a former Treasury mandarin, sat on the Edinburgh-based bank’s board from July 2001 until he was unceremoniously dumped along with six other non-executive directors on February [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date October 25th, 2011 For a central bank director, Andy Haldane is remarkably alert to the widening cracks in the global financial system. Delivering the Wincott Annual Memorial Lecture in London on October 24, Haldane tried to shake policymakers and regulators out of their complacency by calling for a “fundamental shift” [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: October 20th, 2011 There may be a good few Maoists, Trotskyists, Anarcho-Syndicalists and even the odd deluded benefit scrounger among them, but it is simply wrong to characterize the Occupy Wall Street protestors who are camping out in 1,500 cities worldwide as wanting to overthrow capitalism, in the same way [...]
October 16th, 2011 Tomorrow, a one-hour documentary on which I’ve been working, RBS: Inside the Bank That Ran Out of Money, will be shown on BBC One Scotland. The film should be networked across the UK before the end of the year. The investigative documentary charts the rise and fall of Royal Bank of Scotland, [...]
October 8th, 2011 Pullitzer prize-winning war correspondent and author Chris Hedges last week spoke to RT’s Washington correspondent Alyona Minkovski to give his views on the fast-growing Occupy Wall Street movement. Standing amongst protesters from the Occupy D.C. protest, Hedges explained the deep sense of frustration that is giving the movement such impetus in the [...]
October 8th, 2011 How well or badly has the mainstream media done with its Occupy Wall Street coverage? In my view they started out very poorly, with attempts to mock and belittle the protesters from the likes of blogger Nathalie Rothschild, then an Orwellian virtual black out, followed by shockingly slanted coverage from the likes of CNN [...]
October 7th, 2011 New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has thrown his weight behind the Occupy Wall Street protests, saying: “Occupy Wall Street is starting to look like an important event that might even eventually be seen as a turning point.” Krugman, who won the Nobel prize for economics in 2008 and is professor of [...]
October 5th, 2011 David Cameron displayed an astonishing lack of understanding of the banking sector in his interview with Sarah Montague on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on Tuesday morning (as I’m afraid did Sarah, given her blinkered obsession with “bonuses”). If Cameron’s stumbling performance was due to ignorance, then it’s simply inexcusable. If [...]
October 4th, 2011 Video courtesy of Reuters Peter Lauria, technology editor of Reuters, provides a useful overview of the hype surrounding Apple’s imminent launch of the iPhone 5. Speaking from in front of the Apple showroom on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where one launch session kicks off at 6pm UK time, Lauria describes Apple devotees [...]