By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: April 27th, 2012 The debate over executive pay is turning ugly. In the UK, investor disquiet about the unwarranted rewards routinely doled out to bankers despite weak and unethically achieved performance is reaching boiling point. It could well explode at the Barclays AGM in London’s Royal Festival Hall which […]
By: Ian Fraser Published: Financial Times Date: April 23rd, 2012 Ten days ago, Scottish Widows Investment Partnership was caught on the hop by a leak. Though not quite Watergate, an informant, assumed to be a disgruntled fund manager at risk of being collateral damage, had leaked news that the group’s equities business was being savagely restructured. […]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: April 22nd, 2012 photo © Andrew Lee Argyll and Bute Council has hit out at a new survey of housing in the Highlands and Islands which blames its planners for “population decline and low housing construction.” The Lochgilphead-based council condemned the document, a survey of rural planning commissioned […]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: April 17th, 2012 I was happily reading my Sunday Telegraph business section at the weekend, when a particular quote jumped out at me. A City investment analyst was not only pouring scorn on Bob Diamond’s excessive pay and bonuses; but accusing the boards of all UK banks of being wholly detached from […]
April 16th, 2012 Barclays, Citibank, HSBC and Abbey National (now owned by Santander) helped to launder some $250 million for James Ibori, former the former governor of Nigeria’s oil-rich Delta State. The money was almost entirely siphoned from state funds. Ibori has been described by Sahara Reporters as:- “one of the most ingenious and mindless embezzlers of […]
April 16th, 2012 In this speech the economist and author John Kay examined how the financial sector continues to make — or claims to make — returns-on-equity which are way in excess of any reasonable estimate of cost of capital. Kay, a visiting professor at London School of Economics, examined various possible reasons but then focused on […]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: April 16th, 2012 High-speed traders use powerful computers to identify orders as they emerge and instantly trade ahead of them, hoping to earn a small crust on each trade. They use complex algorithms to churn out thousands of trades, and to lesser extent orders, on multiple markets in fractions […]
April 14th, 2012 Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s executive director for financial stability, last year warned that high frequency trading has become an “arms race” that imperils the whole financial system. In a speech in Beijing in July 2011, Haldane said:- Arms races rarely have a winner. This one may be no exception. In […]
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: April 4th, 2012 Michel Barnier is viewed with a mixture of fear and loathing in the City of London. In the Square Mile the Frenchman is variously regarded as a bogeyman, a champion of dirigisme, and even as the ringleader of a sinister Franco-German plot to undermine London’s position and ensure […]