February 15th, 2012 Further to my recent story about Clydesdale Bank and Yorkshire Bank being essentially worthless following their reckless commercial property lending binge in 2005-07 and subsequent blog post, an analyst from UBS has sort of confirmed the story. UBS banking analyst Jonathan Mott is urging Cameron Clyne, chief executive of Melbourne-based NAB to sell [...]
February 14th, 2012 The allegations of “a black hole”, “reckless commercial property lending in 2005-07″, “dodgy accounting” etc at National Australia Bank’s UK subsidiaries Clydesdale Bank and Yorkshire Bank (which I’ve now heard from at least four reliable and independent senior banking sources) just won’t seem to go away. I touched on this in an [...]
February 6th, 2012 People approaching Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest cash machines are increasingly likely to be confronted by a range of ethical choices before they’re able to withdraw their cash. Given the Edinburgh-based bank’s failure to properly reform itself in the wake of its October 2008 taxpayer-funded bailout, and its pariah-like status over [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: February 2nd, 2012 Financial commentators are, suddenly, in demand and it’s largely down to the continuing failure of banks to properly reform themselves in the wake of the global financial crisis and the current public rage about bankers who continue to award themselves massive pay packages even though their [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: February 1st, 2012 The Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett (pictured above playing the ukelele) once famously quipped that a hedge fund is a “compensation scheme masquerading as an asset class”. The remark, a reference to the fact that many hedge funds provide investors with feeble returns whilst massively enriching intermediaries (the hedge fund [...]
January 31st, 2012 The man who destroyed the Bank of Scotland with a reckless and seemingly out-of-control corporate and real-estate lending spree is in the media again. Mortgage Strategy has an article (Living in the age of less reason) which touches on the “pig on pork” or integrated finance model favoured by Peter Cummings, who [...]
January 28th, 2012 Labour is being supremely hypocritical over the £1 million share-based bonus recently awarded to RBS boss Stephen Hester. It was the government of Gordon Brown, which didn’t leave Downing Street until May 2010, that signed off the original contract and subsequent long-term remuneration policies that made the bonus possible. The ministers who [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: January 27th, 2012 The board of Royal Bank of Scotland and its remuneration committee, led by the ex-Coca Cola executive Penny Hughes but also comprising ex-Standard Life boss Sandy Crombie, must have decided let’s just go for it and to hang with the consequences. The RBS board of directors [...]
January 26th, 2012 Apparently the topic on everyone’s lips at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss alpine resort of Davos this year is income inequality and how to reduce it. Does the global corporate elite not realise there is a fairly obvious solution, and it’s staring them in the face? As a starting point [...]
January 24th, 2011 I watched Channel 4′s Krishnan Guru-Murthy interview the prominent US economist Larry Summers on Channel 4 News last night. The first half focuses on the stimulus vs. austerity debate and Monday’s release of secret memos detailing advice given by Summers to President Barack Obama. But what I found more interesting was the [...]
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