The size of the penalties imposed on the UK’s Big 4 banks for illegal misconduct since the crash in 2008-9 is stunning. It amounts to £42bn already levied up to 2014, plus a further £19bn for conduct and litigation charges this year and next. That £61bn total is a staggering figure, equal by one measure to 4% of Britain’s entire GDP and by another well in excess of levies imposed for BP’s oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. KPMG have also estimated that these 4 banks have paid 60% of their profits since 2011 in fines and repayments to customers. Huge though these figures are, they still conceal three important points that indicate the need for radical reform. Continue reading
Posted in Finance
Hound of Hounslow shows non-regulation of banks remains extremely dangerous
No-one had heard of Navinder Singh Sarao until on 6 May 2010 he ‘spoofed’ the international stock markets while sitting in his room in his parents’ semi in Hounslow and made $879,000 on that day alone and, it is alleged, $40 millions fraudulently over 5 years. He is now awaiting extradition to the US to face charges. But the crucial points are that one lone individual (though his connections with several big names in finance have been noted) could generate a ‘flash crash’ causing a loss of £1 trillion of stock market value albeit very temporary) and what damage might be done by market operators with bigger financial resources. Continue reading
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Greek myths retold: confronting the ideologues of austerity
The world economy is not strong and the President of the United States is sufficiently concerned about new shocks to it that he recently met the Greek Finance Minister to urge ‘flexibility on all sides’ in the negotiations between the Syriza-led government and its creditors. US concern is fully justified.
In any attempt to reach agreement it is important both to have an objective assessment of the situation and to understand the perspective of those on the opposite side of the table. In Mythology that blocks progress in Greece Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator for the Financial Times argues that negotiations to date are dominated by myths. He demolishes some of these key myths in turn: that a Greek exit would make the Eurozone stronger, that it would make Greece stronger, that Greece caused the crisis driven by private sector lending, that there has been no effort by Greeks to repay these debts, that Greece has the capacity to repay them, and that defaulting on the debts necessarily entails leaving the Eurozone. Continue reading
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Even the Tories’ naked bribery has now gone pear-shaped
There is a very noticeable difference between the way that the Tories and Labour have conducted this election.
The Tories have used the twin-prong approach: personal vilification which has proved counter-productive and now blatant giveaways (of other people’s money) to try to produce a false feel-good factor. However, no serious policy proposals for the country’s increasingly dire social and economic problems, especially the triple deficit problem of a budget deficit of nearly £100bn, a balance of payments deficit of over £100bn, and a productivity deficit that means living standards can’t rise. Continue reading
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Big four banks (with 1,629 subsidiaries in tax havens) are rotten heart of UK economy
The more that comes to light about the nefarious activities of the Big four banks, the more extraordinary it is that these banks (a) demand a return to business as usual (which of course caused the financial crash in the first place), (b) continue to fight back against any reforms of a dysfunctional finance sector, feeble though these measures are, (c) show not a scintilla of remorse or apology for the decade of disaster they’ve imposed on ordinary people and the economy as a whole (remember Bob Diamond’s infamous comment “It’s time to move on” as though nothing had happened), and (d) have never been held to account by prosecutions of the chief executives, finance directors and other executives responsible. This is all the more staggering when what has now been revealed is the enormous extent to which all 4 banks not only indulged in, but actively promoted, tax evasion/avoidance on an industrial scale. Barclays has 385 subsidiary companies in tax havens (36% of all its subsidiaries), HSBC has 550, Lloyds has 290, and RBS has 404! Continue reading
