November 6th, 2012 By Gordon Neave Picture: The Economist During the late 1980s and early 1990s British bankers changed for the worse. Having spent most of the past three centuries as financial herbivores — solid, reliable and rational members of the community — they metamorphosed into wild, hungry carnivores. Fuelled by commissions, bonuses and greed, [...]
October 21st, 2012 Twelve-year-old Victoria Grant explains why her homeland, Canada, and most of the rest of the world, have become enslaved by debt. She gave this remarkable six-minute speech on April 27th, 2012, at the Public Banking in America Conference, held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Here’s what SmartKnowledgeEU had to say about Victoria Grant [...]
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 [...]
October 10th, 2012 Today the Financial Services Authority formally relaxed capital and liquidity rules on UK banks in the vague hope this might kickstart lending and do something to ensure the UK economy can pick itself up off the floor. The Canary Wharf-based regulator also said that it would not require banks to hold extra [...]
September 26th, 2012 [Ian Fraser's introduction] In this speech, Robert Jenkins blows apart the self-serving myths that bankers and their lobbyists have been peddling since the financial crisis ripped apart the global financial system in 2007-. He also explains that, unfortunately ‘captured’ regulators and politicians have swallowed the myths whole. The unsurprising consequence is that post-crisis [...]
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 [...]
September 7th, 2012 When David Cameron reshuffled his cabinet earlier this week, the arrival of a trio City of London bankers and consultants at Her Majesty’s Treasury went almost unnoticed. This in my view was a lacuna. The three men are Paul Deighton, a former Goldman Sachs partner and chief operating officer for Europe (pictured above), Sajid [...]
September 7th, 2012 The managing director of the Financial Services Authority, Martin Wheatley, has launched a stinging attack on ‘mis-selling’ of financial products by banks, building societies and other financial institutions to their retail customers, even describing the incentive schemes that underpinned the ‘misselling’ of payment protection insurance (PPI) as “rotten to the core”. In [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: August 12th, 2012 STANDARD Chartered, the London-headquartered bank that does most of its business in Asia, was – until the beginning of last week – the last good bank standing. It was one of the select band of banks to characterise themselves as a cut above the rest, having [...]
July 16th, 2012 By The Left Banker Image: WilliamBanzai7 For the past 30 years, the global economy has built up increasingly vast amounts of public, private and household debt. This was to compensate for the fall in real wages and to avoid a repeat of the crisis of over-production of goods and services seen from mid-1970s [...]