January 31st, 2012 The man who destroyed the Bank of Scotland with a reckless and out-of-control corporate and real-estate lending spree is in the media again. Mortgage Strategy has an article (Living in the age of less reason) which touches on the “pig on pork” or integrated finance model favoured by Peter Cummings, who was […]
January 28th, 2012 Labour is being supremely hypocritical over the £1 million share-based bonus recently awarded to RBS boss Stephen Hester. It was the government of Gordon Brown, which didn’t leave Downing Street until May 2010, that signed off the original contract and subsequent long-term remuneration policies that made the bonus possible. The ministers who […]
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 […]
January 26th, 2012 Apparently the topic on everyone’s lips at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss alpine resort of Davos this year is income inequality and how to reduce it. Does the global corporate elite not realise there is a fairly obvious solution, and it’s staring them in the face? As a starting point […]
January 24th, 2012 I watched Channel 4 News’ Krishnan Guru-Murthy interview US economist Larry Summers with mounting disbelief last night. The first half of the 18-minute interview focuses on the stimulus vs. austerity debate and Monday’s release of secret memos detailing advice given by Summers to President Barack Obama. But what I found more interesting […]
January 23rd, 2012 (edited January 2nd, 2013) As part of its special report on state-sponsored capitalism, published in its January 21st issue, the Economist berated emerging markets including China and some developed countries for adopting a model of capitalism in which the state owns many of the prize corporate assets. The special report was credited to […]
January 21st, 2012 The current cross-party campaign to have Sir Fred Goodwin stripped of his knighthood makes for entertaining viewing, but I’m afraid I don’t agree with it. The current witchhunt is handy for the politicians. It gives the impression they’re doing something to punish a perpetrator of the banking crisis but, call me cynical, […]
January 19th, 2012 Another whistleblower has emerged from inside Lloyds Banking Group with well-documented evidence of illegal sales practices in the bank’s retail arm. Ex-Army officer and former UBS and Towry Law executive Ian Taplin was fired by Lloyds in August 2010 after he sought to alert its senior management and board of directors to […]
January 18th, 2012 Ian Fraser’s introduction: This blog was written by Golem XIV, a pseudonym for filmmaker and author David Malone. The lies which got us to the purgatory we are in are being told all over again, right now, inside every bank in the Western world. Not by accident but on purpose, by men with […]
January 12th, 2012 By Eric Sprott and David Baker 2011 was a merry-go-round of more bailouts, more deferrals and more denial. Everyone is tired of the Eurozone. It’s not fixable. There’s too much debt. The politicians don’t know what’s going on. Nothing has structurally changed. We’re still on the wrong path. There’s more global debt than […]