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: October 20th, 2011 There may be a good few Maoists, Trotskyists, Anarcho-Syndicalists and even the odd deluded benefit scrounger among them, but it is simply wrong to characterize the Occupy Wall Street protestors who are camping out in 1,500 cities worldwide as wanting to overthrow capitalism, in the same way [...]
October 5th, 2011 David Cameron displayed an astonishing lack of understanding of the banking sector in his interview with Sarah Montague on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on Tuesday morning (as I’m afraid did Sarah, given her blinkered obsession with “bonuses”). If Cameron’s stumbling performance was due to ignorance, then it’s simply inexcusable. If [...]
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 [...]
September 22nd, 2011 The Occupy Wall Street protests, which kicked off last Saturday, have been derided as an irrelevance by the likes of Nathalie Rothschild in Spiked, and largely ignored by the mainstream media. I accept that the turnout has been much lower than predicted and that some of the protestors are whimsical youngsters who seem somewhat [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: July 11th, 2011 Accountancy has changed beyond recognition since the 1970s. At that time the accountancy professor Roy Sidebotham wrote: “There seems to be no limit to the optimism of businessmen… which the growing complexity of the market opens up. The first line of defence of investors and creditors is the [...]
By: Matt Taibbi Published: Rolling Stone Date: May 26th, 2011 A Senate committee has laid out the evidence. Now the Justice Department should bring criminal charges They weren’t murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. [...]
May 7th, 2011 There was a great editorial in Friday’s Guardian. As the UK banks including Royal Bank of Scotland, together with the British Bankers’ Association, weigh up whether to appeal the recent High Court ruling that obliges them to compensate customers they effectively swindled out of £9 billion to £10bn (£9,000,000,000 to £10,000,000,000) through the [...]
April 21st, 2011 In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the 635-page report prepared by Senator Carl Levin’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations into the causes of the financial crisis. Among other things the report alleges that New York-based investment bank Goldman Sachs, known as the giant vampire squid [...]
April 15th, 2011 FairPensions has produced an excellent, in-depth report which lifts the lid on the conflicts of interest at the heart of pensions management and calls on institutional investors to shape up their act by adopting what it calls an “enlightened fiduciary” model. Under the FairPensions proposals, launched at an event attended by government [...]