March 16th, 2012 Ian Fraser’s introduction: This blog was written by Golem XIV, a pseudonym for filmmaker and author David Malone. Imagine if you were in a plane and you looked down and spread out beneath you, majestic in the ocean, was an entire mighty battle fleet. And then it sank; not just one, but every [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: The Herald Date: March 12th, 2012 Unedited version of article published earlier today in The Herald WARNINGS of legal action will be delivered today to former Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive Fred Goodwin and his ex-boardroom colleagues over allegations that they misled shareholders into investing £12 billion in the bank shortly before [...]
December 17th, 2011 By Brett Sherman Is it reasonable to believe that Wall Street used complexity as a tool to dupe even sophisticated investors as to the quality of bonds backed by non-conforming mortgages during the United States housing bubble? In a word – ABSOLUTELY. Indeed, there was so much complexity in the various methods [...]
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 [...]
June 17th, 2011 Jim Rogers, the plain-speaking, Singapore-based investor, always talks sense about the debt blindness that continues to afflict the West. In this interview on CNN Money, Rogers tells Poppy Harlow: “Greece is bankrupt and the sooner we recognise that and do something about it the better … Eventually we’re going to have to bite [...]
March 10th, 2011 Andy Xie, a board director at Rosetta Stone Advisors, is a man worth listening to. The 49-year-old former Morgan Stanley Asia-Pacific chief economist published an article — “Apocalypse Soon” — on his blog in August 2008, that foresaw what was about to happen. The article detailed how the entire western financial system [...]
February 6th, 2011 “I see more inflation and more currency turmoil as we go forward. There are huge debt imbalances in the world. The US is the largest debtor nation in the world and all the assets are in Asia. The largest creditors in the world are China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore – [...]
November 10th, 2010 The mood ahead of the G20 summit in Korea is turning ugly. America’s actions – especially its policy of deliberate dollar devaluation through quantitative easing – are looking increasingly irresponsible and even reckless to its creditors, some of whom are starting to snap. The Federal Reserve’s policy of buying $75bn of Treasury [...]
September 29th, 2008 Henry “Hank” Paulson pitched it as a panacea for America’s financial woes. But, despite all the sabre-rattling and doom-mongering from US president George Bush, the people of America have not allowed themselves to be hoodwinked. Why should they take ownership of the very worst loans and other assets assembled by the former [...]
By Ian Fraser Sunday Herald February 6th, 2005 ALAN Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, (pictured above) is a “bigger threat to the US economy than Osama bin Laden”, according to a leading Scottish investor. The claim comes from Robin Angus, director of the £150 million Personal Assets Trust and adviser to Edinburgh University’s Centre [...]