October 24th, 2013 By Honestly Banking The banks’ Interest Rate Swaps scam ruined businesses across the UK. Having explained how ‘interest rate swaps’ work and why they were sold in previous posts, we asked the undercover banker Honestly Banking to tell how the banks have managed to get themselves made judge and jury in the […]
By James Nicholls October 23rd, 2013 Banks are in the business of making money – just like every other business – and they do this by providing bank accounts and lending money at a profit. So far so ordinary. They lend to individuals and businesses and most of the time this all goes well, in […]
October 21st, 2013 Gordon Kerr, founder of Cobden Partners, has an interesting take on the $13 billion settlement that JPMorgan Chase is due to agree with the U.S. authorities to end civil claims over its sales of deceptive mortgage bonds. Speaking to Bloomberg TV’s Guy Johnson on “The Pulse” Kerr makes some interesting points. (1) […]
September 18th, 2013 In the video interview above, former HSBC anti-money laundering compliance officer, Everett Stern, frankly describes the criminal methods used by HSBC to launder money for terrorist groups including Hamas and Hezbollah as well as for drug cartels and other criminals. Although the bank paid a $1.9 billion penalty as part of a record-breaking money laundering […]
September 17th, 2013 (updated with minor edits September 24th, 2013) Charlotte Eighteen, a shadowy company based in the tax secrecy jurisdiction of the British Virgin Islands, remains the subject of intense interest among Scottish football fans. Allegedly the holding company for the business assets of Gavin Masterton, the former treasurer and managing director of the […]
10 September 2013 Derek Sach inadvertently gave away some of RBS’s trade secrets in this interview with Debtwire’s Mario Oliviero. Sach — who is in charge of RBS, NatWest and Ulster Bank’s so-called Global Restructuring Group — was interviewed during the Debtwire European Forum in London’s Dorchester Hotel on 16 October 2012. Sach, who joined RBS from […]
August 27th, 2013 For some time now, I have been warning that Clydesdale Bank and Yorkshire Bank are seriously damaged institutions that could — like HBOS in the mid 2000s — be an accident waiting to happen. Still plagued by bad debts and with a parent in Melbourne that has lost patience with them, the […]
August 17th, 2013 You may remember that, back in November 2010, it emerged that a “cocky” Prince Andrew appeared to welcome and endorse bribery and corruption — or at least that he abhors those who would seek to get in its way, including anti-corruption regulators and investigative journalists (by the way, we only know this […]
May 10th, 2013 (updated May 14th 2013) What has become of our markets? Nanex, the market analysis firm, has animated a half second of trading activity in Johnson & Johnson stock. The animation is both intoxicating and mindblowing, not only because of the sheer quantity of trades, each of which is made by computer algorithms (i.e. without […]
April 20th, 2013 Trust in UK financial regulation and auditing cannot be rebuilt unless John Griffith-Jones (pictured right) steps down as chairman of the Financial Conduct Authority, writes HBOS whistleblower Paul Moore, who is also calling for a public inquiry into KPMG’s pre-crash audits of the collapsed bank HBOS. The need for such an inquiry was reinforced on 11 April, […]