By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: April 4th, 2012 Michel Barnier is viewed with a mixture of fear and loathing in the City of London. In the Square Mile the Frenchman is variously regarded as a bogeyman, a champion of dirigisme, and even as the ringleader of a sinister Franco-German plot to undermine London’s position and ensure [...]
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 18th, 2012 Ian Fraser’s introduction: This blog was written by Golem XIV, a pseudonym for filmmaker and author David Malone. The lies which got us to the purgatory we are in are being told all over again, right now, inside every bank in the Western world. Not by accident but on purpose, by men with [...]
January 7th, 2012 I was surprised and disappointed when I opened my copy of The Economist on Friday morning. The magazine is running a feebly-argued propaganda piece headlined “Save the City” as its cover story. The piece vaunts the “skills” that are to be found in the City of London and seeks to persuade us [...]
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” [...]
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 [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: September 22nd, 2011 The gigantic $2.3 billion losses that Union Bank of Switzerland is blaming on a Ghanaian-born “rogue” trader have added power to the elbows of all those who believe that “casino” banking ought to be completely separated from “utility” banking and should never be underwritten by the taxpayer. UBS, [...]
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 [...]
September 12th, 2011 This morning I was listening to Nicky Campbell’s phone-in programme on BBC Radio 5 Live. The topic was the final proposals of Sir John Vickers’ Independent Banking Commission for reforming the UK’s banking system, which were published this morning. To many, including Philip Augar (who since leaving the City in 2000 has done [...]
August 22nd, 2011 There are eerie parallels between the continuing precipitous falls in the shares of European and UK banks and the stomach-churning gyrations seen in September and October 2008. And it’s kind of ironic that one of the biggest fallers, Barclays, bought Lehman Brothers before superimposing its own investment banking logo on the failed [...]