January 7th, 2012 I was surprised and disappointed when I opened my copy of The Economist on Friday morning. The magazine is running a feebly-argued propaganda piece headlined “Save the City” as its cover story. The piece vaunts the “skills” that are to be found in the City of London and seeks to persuade us [...]
December 16th, 2011 Here is the half hour interview I gave to Dori Smith of US-based Talk Nation Radio on December 9th, 2011. There theme is the wilful blindness of the Financial Services Authority to corruption in the UK banking and finance sector. Produced by Dori Smith in Storrs, Connecticut, USA Download at Pacifica’s Audioport here or [...]
November 24th, 2011 Andrew Brigden of Fathom Consulting, a London-based economic and financial markets consultancy, has been poring over the latest UK economic data and concluded that austerity isn’t working for the UK economy. He says:- “Excluding government consumption, final domestic demand is currently 9.1% below its pre-recession peak and is just 1% higher than its trough. [...]
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 [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: September 14th, 2011 The Independent Banking Commission was established by the UK’s coalition government in June 2010 as a means of kicking a thorny and divisive issue into the long grass. At the time, the divisions within the coalition government over what to do about the UK’s bloated and dysfunctional banking sector were [...]
August 11th, 2011 When my ex-boss Roger Neill launched the Centre for Creativity at City University London in winter of 2009, he staged a “Big City Brainstorm” which pulled together a diverse group of people – including several from the City of London. Roger and other people behind the CfC wanted to find ways of addressing [...]
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 [...]
March 8th, 2011 It’s virtually unheard for the governor of a central bank to launch an outspoken attack on the integrity and purpose of his country’s banking sector. But this is what the Bank of England governor Mervyn King did last weekend. In an interview with former Telegraph editor Charles Moore, King, whose central bank [...]
February 8th, 2011 Project Merlin, the wizard scheme originally dreamt up in 2010 by ex-Barclays chief executive John Varley and RBS chairman Sir Philip Hampton, in the hope of appeasing the government and drawing a line under the “banker bashing”, has descended into farce. The project started with the legitimate hope from the bankers that, [...]