By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: December 18th, 2011 (minor edits March 31st, 2013) One of Fred Goodwin’s first acts on being appointed RBS’s chief executive on March 6, 2000 was to sack PWC as auditors and to wheel in his ‘alma mater’, Deloitte & Touche. Ex-insiders suggest this was because Goodwin believed that […]
December 17th, 2011 By Brett Sherman Is it reasonable to believe that Wall Street used complexity as a tool to dupe even sophisticated investors as to the quality of bonds backed by non-conforming mortgages during the United States housing bubble? In a word – ABSOLUTELY. Indeed, there was so much complexity in the various methods […]
December 16th, 2011 Here is the half hour interview I gave to Dori Smith of US-based Talk Nation Radio on December 9th, 2011. There theme is the wilful blindness of the Financial Services Authority to corruption in the UK banking and finance sector. Produced by Dori Smith in Storrs, Connecticut, USA Download at Pacifica’s Audioport here or […]
December 15th, 2011 Writing in the Monday’s Daily Telegraph Royal Bank of Scotland chairman Sir Philip Hampton said the FSA’s report into the RBS collapse would be “an important contribution to the steps needed to restore public trust in RBS, the banking sector, and our regulators”. Unfortunately, the report has had no such effect. Indeed, if the comments […]
By Ian Fraser Published: QFINANCE Date: October 20th, 2011 There may be a good few Maoists, Trotskyists, Anarcho-Syndicalists and even the odd deluded benefit scrounger among them, but it is simply wrong to characterize the Occupy Wall Street protestors who are camping out in 1,500 cities worldwide as wanting to overthrow capitalism, in the same way […]
October 5th, 2011 David Cameron displayed an astonishing lack of understanding of the banking sector in his interview with Sarah Montague on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on Tuesday morning (as, I’m afraid, did Sarah, given her blinkered obsession with “bonuses”). If Cameron’s stumbling performance was due to ignorance, then it’s inexcusable. If it’s […]
October 3rd, 2011 So it was endemic fraud and the collapse of the rule of law—not global imbalances or government and regulatory failure—that destroyed the financial system. In a keynote speech given at the Post Keynes conference in Denmark earlier this year, the Keynesian economist James K. Galbraith of the L.B.J. School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at […]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: July 10th, 2011 THE police force investigating an alleged £1 billion fraud at the former Reading operation of HBOS has no plans to probe the possible role of the bank’s former senior executives and board directors in the scandal. Thames Valley Police, working in conjunction with the Serious Organised […]
By: Matt Taibbi Published: Rolling Stone Date: May 26th, 2011 A Senate committee has laid out the evidence. Now the Justice Department should bring criminal charges They weren’t murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. […]
April 21st, 2011 In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the 635-page report prepared by Senator Carl Levin’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations into the causes of the financial crisis, Anatomy of a Financial Collapse. Among other things the report alleges that New York-based investment bank Goldman Sachs, known as […]