January 18th, 2013 (updated January 19th, 2013) Blair Jenkins, chief executive of the Yes Scotland campaign, today claimed that Scotland “might very well not have had a financial crisis” if it had been an independent country. This is a ridiculous claim which further undermines the credibility of the ‘Yes’ campaign, especially where business, finance and [...]
October 18th, 2012 By Tom Nicol ‘Then the flying machines started falling from the sky.’ Once upon a time in the Westerlands, people became aware of a developing phenomenon: flying machines were falling from the sky with a great deal more regularity than was previously the case. Understandably, the people became uneasy and started to [...]
Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards Submission from Ian Fraser, 24 August 2012 [Update: January 12, 2013. This is my submission to the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, which is being chaired by Andrew Tyrie MP. Written in August 2012, it was published on the Parliamentary website [pdf 28mb] on December 19th, 2012 — it can be found on [...]
August 7th, 2012 By Paul Moore Ian Fraser’s introduction: Paul Moore, the ‘HBOS whistleblower’, has launched a new organisation, the New Wilberforce Alliance, which aims to free the world from the modern-day slavery caused by the financialisation of our culture that took root in the 1980s. Here, Moore explains how the recent revelations of rampant [...]
June 29th, 2012 This is banking’s ‘Milly Dowler’ moment. Finally the blinkers are off and the rest of the world (by which I mean people like leading politicians and the mainstream commentariat) is waking up to the culture of self serving greed and corruption that has infested the UK’s banking sector, about which I’ve been [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Qfinance Date: June 18th, 2012 I was surprised and exasperated to learn last week that chancellor George Osborne has rubber-stamped the appointment of John Griffith-Jones, the senior partner of KPMG, as chairman-designate of the Financial Conduct Authority, one of the two financial regulators that will take over from the soon-to-be-disbanded FSA. As [...]
April 16th, 2012 In this speech the economist and author John Kay examined how the financial sector continues to make — or claims to make — returns-on-equity which are way in excess of any reasonable estimate of cost of capital. Kay, a visiting professor at London School of Economics, examined various possible reasons but then focused on [...]
November 30th, 2011 I had a bizarre sense of déjà vu yesterday on learning of the mass downgrade of 37 of the world’s largest banks, including the Royal Bank of Scotland, by Standard & Poor’s. Something very similar took place in July 2007, when Moody’s downgraded hundreds of CDOs – opaque bundles of securitized ‘toxic’ subprime [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]