By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: April 27th, 2012 The debate over executive pay is turning ugly. In the UK, investor disquiet about the unwarranted rewards routinely doled out to bankers despite weak and unethically achieved performance is reaching boiling point. It could well explode at the Barclays AGM in London’s Royal Festival Hall which [...]
April 14th, 2012 Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s executive director for financial stability, last year warned that high frequency trading has become an “arms race” that imperils the whole financial system. In a speech in Beijing in July 2011, Haldane said:- Arms races rarely have a winner. This one may be no exception. In [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: February 15th, 2012 The Financial Services Authority‘s chairman Lord Turner made a fairly staunch defense of FSA chief executive Hector Sants at a hearing of the Treasury Select Committee on January 30. But some of the MPs on the committee seemed unconvinced that Sants, who earned £807,000 as FSA chief executive in 2010, is the [...]
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” [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
April 20th, 2011 The High Court in London has today ruled that UK banks must compensate millions of people who they ripped off by selling them often useless payment protection insurance (PPI). In the video Martin Lewis, founder of Money Saving Expert, accuses the banks of behaving “disgustingly” throughout the PPI scandal, and urges consumers to check whether [...]
March 8th, 2011 It’s virtually unheard for the governor of a central bank to launch an outspoken attack on the integrity and purpose of his country’s banking sector. But this is what the Bank of England governor Mervyn King did last weekend. In an interview with former Telegraph editor Charles Moore, King, whose central bank [...]
February 21st, 2011 The Bank of England’s Andy Haldane gave a fresh perspective on the causes of the global financial crisis and ran through the bank’s favoured cures at a recent lecture he gave to the Irish think tank the Institute of International and European Affairs. Haldane, the BoE’s executive director of financial stability, who [...]
February 6th, 2011 “I see more inflation and more currency turmoil as we go forward. There are huge debt imbalances in the world. The US is the largest debtor nation in the world and all the assets are in Asia. The largest creditors in the world are China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore – [...]