January 29th, 2010 If you don’t like the messenger, shoot him. This seems to the be the approach favoured by Dubai, the bling-obsessed emirate in the gulf. Dubai’s ruling family, the al-Makthoums, are so in love with opacity — particularly when it comes to fudging the line between public and private sector ownership of troubled […]
January 24th, 2010 By Malcolm Fraser The news that the disgraced former chief executive of RBS, Fred Goodwin, has been given a berth at architecture firm RMJM is strangely delicious, like hearing that the school bully, who is still treated with respect by too many, has turned-up wearing a British National Party badge. RMJM are, […]
January 24th, 2010 Believe it or not, I actually feel some sympathy for politicians where sorting out finance is concerned. If they sit on their hands and adopt a ”do nothing” approach to the dysfunctionality of the global financial system (other than lavishing taxpayer funds on it, to prop up the whole deeply flawed edifice) […]
January 19th, 2010 Kraft boss Irene Rosenfeld (pictured above) has been a bit of a chump in splashing out £11.5bn on UK confectioner Cadbury’s. Writing in the Daily Telegraph in a piece on why most takeovers fail, Jeremy Warner has predicted the deal will probably end up ruining both companies. As usual, the only real […]
January 15th, 2010 This film, produced by the American Museum of Natural History, enables you to see through time to the origins of the known universe. The awesome clip starts in the Himalayas then moves out through the Earth’s atmosphere and into the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every […]
January 15th, 2010 Some of you are asking why I have recently published letters written by third parties to prime minister Gordon Brown and to Eric Daniels, chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group, on my website. The reason is that Lloyds, HBOS and the UK government have behaved abominably and deceptively over the past few […]
Rt Hon. Gordon Brown, MP 10 Downing Street London SW1 2AA 14th January 2010 Dear Mr Brown Re: HBOS Reading – Quayside Corporate Services We first alerted you to the existence and nature of the HBOS/Bank of Scotland Reading scandal 15 months ago and asked you to intervene at that point, but you don’t seem […]
January 14th, 2010 Mike Mayo, an analyst and managing director at brokerage CLSA, yesterday delivered a memorable diagnosis of what went wrong with the US banking sector. In his testimony to the US Congress’s Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Mayo also prescribed some cures (to be outlined in a future blog post) Mayo is appalled by the […]
Mr. Eric Daniels Chief Executive Lloyds Banking Group 25 Gresham Street London EC2V 7HN 13th January 2010 Dear Mr Daniels, You are one of the few people with the ability to instruct lawyers to put a motion in to Court adjourning the next hearing to repossess the home of Paul and Nikki Turner — at […]
January 12th, 2010 Eric Daniels believes Lloyds Banking Group’s disclosures relating to its disastrous HBOS deal were “thorough” and “accurate”. Oh yeah? So why didn’t they mention of the £25bn emergency government loan without which HBOS would have gone bust? Watching the Treasury Select Committee hearing this morning, I was struck by the contrasting performances […]