By Ian Fraser Published: Daily Record Date: June 13th, 2013 Stephen Hester’s five years at the helm of Royal Bank of Scotland were nothing if not tumultuous. Under his predecessor, Fred Goodwin, retail banking operations were used as a cash cow to fund overseas expansion, staff were demoralised by a regime of fear, and many [...]
January 4th, 2012 In this interview Pullitzer-prize-winning US financial journalist Jesse Eisinger comments on the balance sheet obfuscation still favoured by America’s banks and on why no chief executive of a US bank, or indeed any other senior banker (with the possible exception of a couple in Ireland and Iceland), has been prosecuted or jailed for [...]
December 15th, 2012 Image: WilliamBanzai7 The ‘settlements’ that London-headquartered banks HSBC and Standard Chartered have reached with the US authorities over serious criminal offences — including sanctions-busting and aiding and abetting terrorism and the global drug trade — are a travesty of justice. Even The Economist, a publication of which I am not usually fan, had [...]
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 19th, 2012 This edited transcript is expanded from a live phone interview with Michael Hudson by Dimitris Yannopoulos for Athens News. It summarizes some of the major themes from Hudson’s new book, The Bubble and Beyond: Fictitious Capital, Debt Deflation and Global Crisis, published in the UK in July 2012 and available from Amazon.co.uk. The [...]
October 18th, 2012 By Rowan Bosworth-Davies “Go where you will, in business parts, or meet who you like of businessmen, it is – and has been for the last three years – the same story and the same lament. Dishonesty, untruth, and what may, in plain English, be termed mercantile swindling within the limits of [...]
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 [...]
July 18th, 2012 Image by WilliamBanzai7 A friend who works for for Barclays told me what the culture is now like at such banks these days. In response to a question about how bankers have changed — in terms of culture, motivations, behaviour — over the past two decades, he said: “I have the advantage [...]
July 16th, 2012 Another great piece of subversive art by William Banzai 7