By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: September 30th, 2012 Fund managers are ripping off their customers through a minefield of hidden charges, misleading advertising, and obfuscation over performance, according the founders of new campaign aimed at ensuring investors get a fairer deal. Alan and Gina Miller – a husband and wife team who held [...]
September 24th, 2012 I’m half way through Simon Carswell’s Anglo Republic: Inside the bank that broke Ireland, and it’s a gripping read. In the book Carswell, finance correspondent of the Irish Times, describes how, from small beginnings, Anglo Irish Bank became a highly leveraged bet on the future of Ireland’s increasingly unsustainable property market, became a [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
November 23rd, 2011 Updated November 24th: This handy interactive infographic shows how sovereign debt has exploded in European countries in recent years. According to the figures, the country with the highest debt-to-GDP ratio for each and every year from 1980 to 2010 was Belgium – and it was only overtaken by Greece in 2011. The [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: November 6th, 2011 Nicolas Sarkozy had hoped to use his time as head of the G20 to achieve lofty goals like rethinking the global financial system and tackling commodity price volatility. But the French president has ended up doing little other than fire-fighting and his tenure may yet [...]
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 [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: August 12th, 2011 The temporary short selling bans imposed by Belgium, France, Italy and Spain in the hope of rooting out perceived market abuse and trying to restore a semblance of calm to volatile financial markets have gone down like a lead balloon in the markets. Investors, industry bodies and academics [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: July 26th, 2011 The package of measures thrashed out by French president Nicolas Sarkozy, German chancellor Angela Merkel and other European policymakers at their emergency summit on July 21 was immediately hailed for its boldness. After months of prevarication the continent’s leaders seemed to have pulled out all the [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: July 17th, 2011 There aren’t many signs of national bankruptcy in Siena. There is the odd boarded-up shop and the occasional “everything under 99c” store but the cafes are full and la dolce vita goes on. So it came as a shock to find that Italy is being lined [...]