March 27th, 2008 Failure often gets rewarded in the zany world of British plcs and the latest to succumb is Barclays. First, the London-based bank chose to pay its president Bob Diamond £36 million last year, making the American investment banker the highest-paid executive of any FTSE 100 company. And that was in a year during which Barclays lost […]
By Ian Fraser Sunday Herald March 23rd, 2008 Big five banks admonished by governor King as they plead for more support. BANK OF England governor Mervyn King used his now-famous meeting with the chief executives of the “big five” UK banks last Thursday to admonish them for increasing shareholder dividends, as they came begging for […]
March 18th, 2008 ALAN Greenspan, a man who was described as a “bigger threat to the US economy than Osama bin Laden” during his Fed years and now increasingly regarded as the architect of the sub-prime crisis that could tip us into global recession, certainly has quite a cheek. In an article published in Monday’s FT (“We will never have a perfect […]
By Ian Fraser Sunday Herald March 16th, 2008 The City of Edinburgh council’s pension fund has pledged itself to an aggressive pursuit of Swedish telecoms giant Ericsson in a US court. The £3.1 billion Lothian Pension Fund, together with several other investors, has filed a class-action suit against Ericsson, which it accuses of artificially inflating […]
15th March, 2008 I’ve always disliked pretentious and misleading jargon. So I was delighted at the way in which The Times edited the following quote from an anonymous hedgie in today’s edition. “The smaller players with $10 million or so of funds, guys who jumped out of the investment banks to set up on their own, […]
March 11th, 2008 Uber-bears will take comfort from the latest predictions of the US academic Nouriel Roubini – a former economic adviser to President Bill Clinton who is now professor of economics at New York University’s Stern school of business. Speaking on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme this morning, the professor argued that we […]
By Ian Fraser Financial Times FTfm section March 10th, 2008 SLI chief Keith Skeoch looks back at the eventful decade since the company’s spin-off from Standard Life. Ian Fraser reports Keith Skeoch is nothing if not consistent. Four years ago, the Standard Life Investments chief executive caused a few ripples in the investment world when […]
By Ian Fraser Sunday Herald March 9th, 2008 Analysts say homespun identity of Citizens Financial set to change ROYAL BANK of Scotland, whose ambitions to enlarge its US footprint through the acquisition of Chicago-based bank LaSalle last year proved abortive, has experienced a further setback in the US market. Stephen Steinour, appointed president and chief […]
By Ian Fraser Sunday Herald March 9th, 2008 THE TRUSTEES of UK pension funds, who oversee the investment of £900 billion of assets, have been chastised for their blind faith in the bonds market during a speech at a major investment conference in Edinburgh. UK pension schemes have, over the past seven or eight years, […]
March 7th, 2008 HAVING a panoply of former politicians – including the former British prime John Major and former US president George H W Bush – on the payroll has not stopped Carlyle Group from ending up with egg all over its face over the collapse of a Guernsey-based mortgage bond fund. Carlyle Capital Corporation, listed on […]