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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The reporting season is underway, with Barclays going first this year announcing record profits of £11.6bn for 2009 and the traditional claims and counterclaims can be heard. The ‘silly season’ at newspapers used to be in August when Parliament recessed but it seems we now have another period of the year when papers get on [...]
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The November 2 elections in the U.S. brought the greatest change in national politics since the 1940s, according to Peter Hart, a national pollster often affiliated with the Democratic Party. From coast to coast, Democratic states went Republican in elections for Congressional seats and governors. “A category 5 hurricane hit the Democrats.” Voters think the [...]
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In response to new regulations in the US restricting overdraft fees, banks have the choice of trying to preserve the fees or use mobile alerts to allow consumers to move funds and avoid overdraft fees, according to Javelin Strategy & Research report on Reg E. Almost twice as many overdraft violators – consumers who have [...]
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Uh oh – FT columnist Gillian Tett is quoting a French sociologist … This sort of thing could get dangerous, but it looks intriguing. Drawing on her time in Japan, which prompted me to pull her book about the experience off the shelf, she reminds readers that westerners were constantly telling Japan they had too [...]
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Could American consumers come out of this crisis with a little help from Washington? The Obama administration is pushing a new consumer protection agency to regulate the bankers, and the bankers are going to do their best to kill it. This agency would focus solely on the consumer and the proposed legislation would give it [...]
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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 [...]
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What role should derivatives play in a reformed financial services marketplace? I have yet to see much intelligent discussion on the topic and was really disappointed that the FT, in a full page article, resorted to a simple comment from a market participant and never sought other opinions: “Forcing OTC products on to exchanges … [...]
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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 [...]
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The FSA’s new rules on liquidity management threaten to overload banks with reporting that the regulator won’t be able to understand while missing the source of the current financial crisis, said panelists at a Financial Services Club Capital Markets forum on 10 March. Because the session was conducted under the Chatham House rule, this commentary [...]
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