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 [...]
February 6th, 2012 People approaching Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest cash machines are increasingly likely to be confronted by a range of ethical choices before they’re able to withdraw their cash. Given the Edinburgh-based bank’s failure to properly reform itself in the wake of its October 2008 taxpayer-funded bailout, and its pariah-like status over [...]
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: December 1st, 2011 The bizarre contortions that the Church of England got itself into over the protesters who are camping outside St Paul’s Cathedral are nothing when compared to the tortured mindsets of many of those who work in the City of London. The survey Value and Values: Perceptions of [...]
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 [...]
October 3rd, 2011 So it was endemic fraud and the collapse of the rule of law—not global imbalances or government and regulatory failure—that destroyed the financial system. In a keynote speech given at the Post Keynes conference in Denmark earlier this year, the Keynesian economist James K. Galbraith of the L.B.J. School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at [...]
August 11th, 2011 When my ex-boss Roger Neill launched the Centre for Creativity at City University London in winter of 2009, he staged a “Big City Brainstorm” which pulled together a diverse group of people – including several from the City of London. Roger and other people behind the CfC wanted to find ways of addressing [...]
June 26th, 2011 The patience of António Horta-Osório, the Portuguese-born boss of Lloyds Banking Group, appears to be wearing thin. According to a comment piece in the Sunday Telegraph, the former Goldman Sachs and Santander banker has pleaded with executives from Lloyds and the former HBOS to stop hiding the truth from him. The paper’s [...]
June 10th, 2011 The credit rating agencies performed so woefully in the run-up to the global financial crisis, one might have thought they would be utterly discredited by now. One of the agencies most heinous mistakes was their rampant mislabeling of residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) in 2004-07. At the time, the rating [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Financial Times Date May 23rd, 2011 As Antonio Horta-Osório, chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group, weighs up whether or not to sell Scottish Widows Investment Partnership, the bank’s asset management arm, the consensus in the City is that he should plump for a sale. He is due to announce the decision [...]