September 18th, 2012 A satirical look at the banking and financial crisis from Bremner, Bird & Fortune. This is part one of a four-part series first broadcast on the UK’s Channel 4 in November 2008.
September 17th, 2012 (Updated 11.25am) (edited Dec 16th 2012) Studiously ignoring the roles of “establishment” figures like Sir James Crosby and Lord Stevenson in the demise of disastrous Edinburgh-based bank HBOS, the Financial Services Authority is seeking to heap all the ordure on the less establishment Peter Cummings. Now I am not suggesting that Cummings is [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Signet Magazine Date: July 16th, 2012 (minor edits March 28th, 2013) Scottish banking was once renowned for prudential management. Today the association is rather different. Financial journalist Ian Fraser gives his view of events behind the collapse of RBS and HBOS and calls for a Leveson-style inquiry. PDF version of this [...]
July 5th, 2012 (updated July 6th, 6.35pm and 11.58pm) Smearing the facilitators? Ex-Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond had been tipped to ‘throw his toys out of the pram’ in the Treasury Select Committee hearing this afternoon. He was expected to lash out at the authorities that had engineered his ousting. It was also thought he [...]
June 29th, 2012 This is banking’s ‘Milly Dowler’ moment. Finally the blinkers are off and the rest of the world (by which I mean people like leading politicians and the mainstream commentariat) is waking up to the culture of self serving greed and corruption that has infested the UK’s banking sector, about which I’ve been [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: The Herald Date: June 26, 2012 Disgraced former Royal Bank of Scotland chief Fred Goodwin will tell a court that he did not dupe the bank’s shareholders when he asked them for £12 billion just months before its near-collapse, writes IAN FRASER. Mr Goodwin and other former directors are facing a £3bn [...]
February 27th, 2010 (updated June 22nd, 2012) HBOS’s entrance on The Mound; Image: The We Lessons must be learnt from the short and calamitous history of HBOS, the bank which effectively went bust in September 2008, writes Ian Fraser (Note: This article was first posted under the headline “HBOS: When did the rot set in? [...]
By Rowan Bosworth-Davies White-collar crime, and particularly fraud and wrong-doing in the City of London, has been ignored by regulators and the judiciary for too long. The global financial crisis has highlighted how, if left unchecked it can cause almost incalculable damage to ordinary people’s lives and the wider economy. The biggest disincentive to City [...]
By Jim Parton Published: March 16th, 2012 Hector wasn’t a ‘card-carrying nasty bastard’. He was merely bland, writes former colleague Jim Parton ‘I couldn’t see the point of suffering in the City of London if the sums I earned were only mildly revolting, as opposed to completely obscene.’ These were the somewhat amoral opening words [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: February 8th, 2012 A commissioner at a leading US financial regulator has launched a stinging attack on his own organization, accusing it of having its priorities all wrong. Scott O’Malia accused the Washington-based Commodities Futures Trading Commission, an agency of the US Federal government, of becoming so bogged down in [...]