October 20th, 2012 (updated October 31st, 2012) On January 1st, 2008, some bright sparks at the FSA decided it was appropriate to grant Advanced Internal Ratings Based (AIRB) status to both Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS. In doing so, the Canary Wharf-based regulator was effectively giving the two Edinburgh-headquartered banks carte blanche to calculate the [...]
August 7th, 2012 By Paul Moore Ian Fraser’s introduction: Paul Moore, the ‘HBOS whistleblower’, has launched a new organisation, the New Wilberforce Alliance, which aims to free the world from the modern-day slavery caused by the financialisation of our culture that took root in the 1980s. Here, Moore explains how the recent revelations of rampant [...]
August 1st, 2012 Raúl Ilargi Meijer, editor-in-chief of The Automatic Earth, wrote three weeks ago that Libor rigging was a criminal conspiracy from the start. Here he provides an update which summarizes how collusion between large banks and central banks/regulators allowed the rate-rigging scandal to continue unchecked, at the expense of society and the real economy, [...]
July 8th, 2012 The eventual outcome of the global Libor rigging scandal is impossible to call at this stage. There is a body of opinion that it might end up being a storm in a teacup (sounds familiar?), given that regulators and courts might end up stuggling to establish who got scammed and the true [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: April 27th, 2012 The debate over executive pay is turning ugly. In the UK, investor disquiet about the unwarranted rewards routinely doled out to bankers despite weak and unethically achieved performance is reaching boiling point. It could well explode at the Barclays AGM in London’s Royal Festival Hall which [...]
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 [...]
March 18th, 2012 Demands for a Leveson-style public inquiry into the UK’s dysfunctional banking sector are reaching a crescendo following the FSA’s partial whitewash of the RBS collapse, a cover-up of events surrounding the Bradford & Bingley rights issue, doubts about the regulator’s commitment to getting to the bottom of what happened at HBOS and much establishment [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: March 9th, 2012 The “Washington Consensus” ought to have been consigned to the scrapheap of history by now. The consensus – also known as neo-classical economics – supported global macroeconomic policy including financial (de)regulation and central bank policy, for most of the past three decades. But the Panglossian assumptions about financial [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: February 1st, 2012 The Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett (pictured above playing the ukelele) once famously quipped that a hedge fund is a “compensation scheme masquerading as an asset class”. The remark, a reference to the fact that many hedge funds provide investors with feeble returns whilst massively enriching intermediaries (the hedge fund [...]
January 26th, 2012 Apparently the topic on everyone’s lips at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss alpine resort of Davos this year is income inequality and how to reduce it. Does the global corporate elite not realise there is a fairly obvious solution, and it’s staring them in the face? As a starting point [...]