October 2nd, 2012 Speaking to an audience of students and finance industry insiders at the London School of Economics yesterday, Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive Stephen Hester renounced the Friedman Doctrine that has done so much damage to our economy and society since the 1970s. Hester said that banks and other companies have been [...]
September 28th, 2012 (updated Sept 29th, 2012) In the days after the Libor scandal erupted with the Barclays settlement of June 27th, there was little doubt about it. Banks including Barclays had been systematically engaged in the rigging, and attempts to rig, the Libor interbank rates as well as other aspects of the financial markets [...]
September 7th, 2012 The managing director of the Financial Services Authority, Martin Wheatley, has launched a stinging attack on ‘mis-selling’ of financial products by banks, building societies and other financial institutions to their retail customers, even describing the incentive schemes that underpinned the ‘misselling’ of payment protection insurance (PPI) as “rotten to the core”. In [...]
July 17th, 2012 In this interview with Bill Moyers, Sheila Bair, the former chairperson of the FDIC, describes the Libor rigging scandal as a wake up call for governments around the world. She says that governments, including the US government, must now “stand up to the banks and tell them they need to start doing business differently, [...]
By Prem Sikka, University of Essex July 8th, 2012 The role of Barclays bank in manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) continues to dominate international financial media. The bank has already attracted fines from regulators in the UK and theUSA. But further revelations are likely as US Senate Committees are flexing their muscles, the UK [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Qfinance Date: June 18th, 2012 I was surprised and exasperated to learn last week that chancellor George Osborne has rubber-stamped the appointment of John Griffith-Jones, the senior partner of KPMG, as chairman-designate of the Financial Conduct Authority, one of the two financial regulators that will take over from the soon-to-be-disbanded FSA. As [...]
April 4th, 2012 In the third in a series of guest posts, Rowan Bosworth-Davies, a financial crime consultant and former Scotland Yard detective, examines the strange assumption that ultimately led to the failure of the FSA When I was a detective at the Metropolitan Police Company Fraud Department, in 1984, my commander sent me to the USA to [...]
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 [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: CA Magazine Date: April 2nd, 2012 New regulations for banks aim to prevent a repeat of the 2008 meltdown, but are they in fact hampering their ability to do business and aid economic recovery, asks Ian Fraser During the two decades leading up to the banking crisis, the banks had never [...]
March 16th, 2012 In the second in a series of guest posts, Rowan Bosworth-Davies, a financial crime consultant and former Scotland Yard detective, provides a historical perspective on the UK authorities’ lack of appetite for prosecuting high level financial crime Edwin Sutherland, the American sociologist and criminologist (pictured right), is perhaps best known for his 1949 book ‘White [...]