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 [...]
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 [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: January 27th, 2012 The board of Royal Bank of Scotland and its remuneration committee, led by the ex-Coca Cola executive Penny Hughes but also comprising ex-Standard Life boss Sandy Crombie, must have decided let’s just go for it and to hang with the consequences. The RBS board of directors [...]
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 [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: September 3rd, 2011 As leader of the opposition, David Cameron gave the impression he intended to be tough on the banks. In an interview with Sky News in January 2009, he called for criminal actions against bankers and earlier said we needed “a day of reckoning” for those [...]
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 [...]
March 29th, 2011 A report just out from the New Economics Foundation reveals that the UK has learnt nothing from the financial crisis of 2008-11. The report, co-authored by Andrew Simms and Lydia Prieg, reminds us that the coalition government — still very much in the thrall of the bankers and vested interests in the City of [...]