Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards Submission from Ian Fraser, 24 August 2012 [Update: January 12, 2013. This is my submission to the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, which is being chaired by Andrew Tyrie MP. Written in August 2012, it was published on the Parliamentary website [pdf 28mb] on December 19th, 2012 — it can be found on […]
September 17th, 2012 (Updated 11.25am) (edited Dec 16th 2012) Studiously ignoring the roles of “establishment” figures like Sir James Crosby and Lord Stevenson in the demise of disastrous Edinburgh-based bank HBOS, the Financial Services Authority is seeking to heap all the ordure on the less establishment Peter Cummings. Now I am not suggesting that Cummings is […]
August 11th, 2012 According to a Reuters report earlier, Standard Chartered is this weekend in talks with US regulators with a view to reaching a carefully choreographed settlement along similar lines to the “sweetheart” deal that Barclays reached with the US department of justice for similar Iran-related criminality in August 2010. Reuters says the settlement may […]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: July 22nd, 2012 The Royal Bank of Scotland has reneged a job offer to a leading anti-money-laundering expert who it appointed to help improve anti-money-laundering systems and controls on discovering he had blown the whistle on drugs money-laundering by a former employer. In an employment tribunal to be […]
July 20th, 2012 I entirely agree with Matt Taibbi here. Rush transcript from Democracy Now below:- JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We end today’s show with Matt Taibbi. He’s a contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine. His most recent in-depth piece is “The Scam Wall Street Learned from the Mafia: How America’s Biggest Banks Took Part in a […]
By Ian Fraser Published: Signet Magazine Date: July 16th, 2012 (minor edits March 28th, 2013) Scottish banking was once renowned for prudential management. Today the association is rather different. Financial journalist Ian Fraser gives his view of events behind the collapse of RBS and HBOS and calls for a Leveson-style inquiry. PDF version of this […]
By Ian Fraser Published: July 15th, 2012 Published: Sunday Herald In his glory days Fred Goodwin aspired to make Royal Bank of Scotland a global bank on which the sun never set. Corporate videos extolling the group’s global reach were routinely played at investor meetings. His legacy is a world of trouble, with the bank […]
July 12th, 2012 The American economist Adam Posen, a member of the monetary policy committee of the Bank of England, recently told a conference in Edinburgh that it’s high time the UK lost its “bank fetish” and stopped treating banking as strategic industry. He said we need counter-cyclical taxes on real estate and that we must […]
By Prem Sikka, University of Essex July 8th, 2012 The role of Barclays bank in manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) continues to dominate international financial media. The bank has already attracted fines from regulators in the UK and theUSA. But further revelations are likely as US Senate Committees are flexing their muscles, the UK […]
July 8th, 2012 The eventual outcome of the global Libor rigging scandal is impossible to call at this stage. There is a body of opinion that it might end up being a storm in a teacup (sounds familiar?), given that regulators and courts might end up stuggling to establish who got scammed and the true […]