As I sat listening to George Osborne’s Budget the other week I was wondering what major impact, if any, it might have on the banking sector and, of course, on the price of the pint in my hand that lunchtime. Well the ‘journalist tax’ on beer went up by 4p unfortunately and bankers weren’t spared [...]
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How often does a bank regulator feature in a rap video? Check this out. Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law prof who is now in line to become head of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an idea she proposed and Congress recently wrote into its financial reform legislation. Joe Nocera in The New York Times [...]
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Larry Ellison has said that with the acquisition of Sun he is ready to take on IBM in the enterprise. Others don’t think so. I’ve been steadily impressed with what IBM is doing in financial services. Everyone talks solutions, and has done for years, but IBM seems to offer the combination of hardware, software and [...]
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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 [...]
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Holman Jenkins of the Journal quotes Warren Buffett on the destructiveness of mark to market accounting for regulatory purposes and goes on to explain: “Banks can be forced to raise capital when capital is unavailable or unduly expensive; regulators can be forced to treat banks as insolvent though their assets continue to perform. What happens [...]
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OK, the tech visionaries who want to talk about innovation in banking probably don’t have a social life anyway, so here’s an event for them – BarCampBank, which promotes itself as the Unconference group is holding a full day confernce on Saturday 14 February at Sun’s offices in London. “If you are an innovator, a [...]
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What’s not to like about this — a winter seminar in lovely Sarasota, FL — on the Gulf of Mexico. And the speaker list makes it all look legit. Sponsored by BITS and the FInancial Services Technology Consortium, it will provide senior financial services executives with the opportunity to explore new technology and R&D to [...]
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I wrote a piece about green banking that appears in the latest issue of Banking Technology. It includes steps being taken by Citi and Bank of America, among others. So I was amused the other day to get a paper statement from BoA telling me I had a zero balance in my line of credit. And I [...]
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In the works for two and a half years, according to one person on the team, Microsoft has brought out a new version of HPC with the familiar Windows front end, so Super Power (Kryptonite not included in the base price) is not only available but usable. The company wheeled out some impressive executives for [...]
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I am working on a story about green and banking, and frankly I am approaching the topic with a bit of skepticism. The ultimate green move would be to decrease consumption, but what would that do to the credit industry. Ah, what credit industry, you ask. Hmm, good point. I was struck by an obvious [...]
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