May 10th, 2013 (updated May 14th 2013) What has become of our markets? Nanex, the market analysis firm, has animated a half second of trading activity in Johnson & Johnson stock. The animation is both intoxicating and mindblowing, not only because of the sheer quantity of trades, each of which is made by computer algorithms (i.e. without [...]
April 20th, 2013 Trust in UK financial regulation and auditing cannot be rebuilt unless John Griffith-Jones (pictured right) steps down as chairman of the Financial Conduct Authority, writes HBOS whistleblower Paul Moore, who is also calling for a public inquiry into KPMG’s pre-crash audits of the collapsed bank HBOS. The need for such an inquiry was reinforced on 11 April, [...]
April 15th, 2013 Ten days ago the former bosses of HBOS were accused of a “colossal failure of management” by the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards. Today Channel 4 News’s business correspondent Siobhan Kennedy tried to catch up with the bank’s former chief executive, Andy Hornby. Now chief executive of the betting chain Gala Coral, [...]
April 13th, 2013 Finally, we have evidence that banks and bankers are not above the law in the United Kingdom. It seems the courts have finally woken up to the fact that allowing them to lie, cheat, deceive and defraud without legal impediment may not be a particularly good idea. As such, yesterday’s appeal court [...]
April 11th, 2013 Yesterday, the government of first minister Alex Salmond gave a £1.7 million Regional Selective Assistance grant to the ‘Big Four’ accountancy firm KPMG to establish a tax avoidance centre in Glasgow. To me this is an astonishing waste of public money, a kick in the teeth to ordinary taxpayers, detrimental to the long-term [...]
March 7th, 2013 Senator Elizabeth Warren (Democrat-Massachusetts), has once again revealed the dangerous double standards at the heart of the US justice system. Appearing at the Senate Banking Committee, the former Harvard law professor questioned officials from the US Treasury Department and US Federal Reserve over why criminal charges were not pressed on HSBC or [...]
February 10th, 2013 In September 2007, a year before Ireland’s banks went belly up, Jonathan Sugarman, risk manager Unicredit Bank Ireland, alerted his bosses and regulators at the Central Bank of Ireland to the fact that Unicredit was in massive breach of liquidity requirements. The law was clear: liquidity cover was allowed to fall to 89 [...]
February 6th, 2013 If this is the best he can do, Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive Stephen Hester should consider throwing in the towel and conceding what most people already know — that RBS, as it stands, is unmanageable and running an unsustainable business model. Hester (who remains in denial about the egregious wrongdoing [...]
February 6th, 2013 Kevin Mason, a commenter on the Guardian website, had this to say about the £390 million settlement that Royal Bank of Scotland reached with the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, US Department of Justice and Financial Services Authority over rampant Libor-rigging today [Mason's words sourced from Graeme Wearden's excellent Libor rigging live blog published [...]
January 24th, 2013 This is the first interview that Chicago lawyer Anton Valukas has given since the publication of his 2,292 page report into the bankrutpcy of Lehman Brothers on March 11th, 2010. At that time, Valukas found strong evidence of financial and accounting fraud designed to deceive investors at the defunct New York-based investment [...]