Better add Vanity Fair and yes, Rolling Stone, to your reading list if you want to understand the financial crisis. No longer are Banking Technology, the Economist and the FT enough.
In the current Vanity Fair  Michael Lewis, of “Liar’s Poke” fame, delves into the role played by AIG Financial Products.
“Here is an amazing fact,” writes [...]

Filed under: Credit Crunch | Comments Off

 The US needs a single financial stability regulator, said Tom Ryan, chief executive of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA).  In a recent presentation at a Reuters conference, Ryan said that regulatory agency will need better information.
“Regulators are basically rear view people.” They have been operating with data that is three months old. [...]

Filed under: Technology | Comments Off

 At a SunGard conference in New Orleans a bunch of years ago, an executive from a Chinese bank – it may have been Citic – explained that they were buying Panorama for risk management so they could learn how western banks did risk.
A week or two ago the International Herald Tribune carried a front page [...]

Filed under: Technology | Comments Off

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital is a slim (171 pages of text) book with a hefty punch. In it Carlota Perez charts major technological changes over two centuries that drew in massive amounts of speculative capital, created a bubble that then burst, and then continued in a quieter fashion to spread through the world drawing [...]

Filed under: Technology | Comments Off

I think it was US President Harry Truman who wanted a one-armed economist so he couldn’t say, “On the one hand, on the other hand …” Paul Donovan from UBS proved himself funnier, and more provocative, than one would expect from at economist during TradeTech.
Hmm, does that sound like damning with faint praise?
He sees causes [...]

Filed under: Technology | Comments Off

Will the debate about bank models be superceded by other players? In the UK Tesco is now offering financial products including savings, loans, mortgges and insurance, directly.
Wal-Mart tried to get into the business in the US a couple of years ago by buying a rather obscure sort of banking license, but bank opposition managed to [...]

Filed under: Technology | Comments Off

It wasn’t so long ago – maybe a year or 18 months – that the light-touch FSA approach to regulation by principle seemed so much more enlightened than the SEC’s lawyer-intensive style with fat volumes of rules.  I contrasted the FSA approach favourably to the SEC several times in various blogs.
Now, that makes you nostalgic [...]

Filed under: Technology | Comments Off

Governments in the UK and US have substantial stakes in leading banks. They shouldn’t be deterred by inadequate contractual language in their emergency rescues and infusion of funds during a crisis – they should set some new rules where necessary to protect taxpayers, not incumbent bankers who caused this disaster.
The most obvious is to demand [...]

Filed under: Technology | Comments Off

Amazing how fast this has been moving. The Wall Street Journal has provided excellent coverage with in-depth reporting including the corporate politics that mostly occur well out of sight. (The Journal’s editorial page remains, as it has been historically, mostly a source of comic relief.)
Pity the poor weeklies – the news keeps coming over the [...]

Filed under: Credit Crunch, Technology, regulation, risk | Comments Off

The Letters page in the Financial Times has become quite interesting in recent weeks  On 20 March, the president of the CFA Institute, Jeff Diermeier, defended fair value reporting, i.e. mark to market.
 “Recent market problems stemming from a lack of transparency in subprime lending and securitisations based on such loans have added a new urgency [...]

Filed under: Technology, risk | Comments Off