Osborne’s sacking of Martin Wheatley, head of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) says it all. His sin was that he was too tough on the banks. The banks are the most powerful section of the Establishment which runs Britain, and Osborne is one of their chattels who does their bidding when half of the Tories’ annual income comes from the UK finance sector, so Wheatley had to go. This is a political ousting of the worst kind. Wheatley was a tough regulator which was needed, and is still needed, when almost every week new scandals are unearthed in the finance sector, when the banks cost the UK £70bn in bailouts and a doubling of the national debt to £1.4 trillions, and when new areas of systemic financial risk including the revival of derivatives that caused the crash in the first place and the growth of the shadow banking sector threaten another financial armageddon. Continue reading
Tagged with Bankers
Banks have taken over the State and got away with it
Six global banks, two them British, have just been fined £5.6bn in what the FBI has called ‘massive scale’ criminality, yet no individual executive has been prosecuted and no bank has been deprived of its licence to practise which would have happened in any other sector given such monumental wrongdoing. Indeed State regulators have gone out of their way to protect them from any such consequences. None of the charges in respect of any of the banks has been brought to trial so that the full scale and nature of these criminal activities will never be publicly disclosed. Two of the banks did not admit to any crimes related to this abuse, though they still paid up, but the other 4 who did were then given waivers shielding them from the consequences that would normally follow – the loss of the all-important banking licence. The banks have an armlock around the neck of the State. Continue reading
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The City & Wall St are a hotbed of lawbreaking & regulation isn’t working
The implications of the latest survey of the City of London’s culture are stunning. The study by University of Notre Dame and a law firm revealed that nearly a fifth of respondents believed that “financial service personnel must sometimes engage in unethical or illegal activity to be successful in the current financial environment”. It found that there had been a “marked decline” in ethics over the last 2 years and, most worryingly of all, that half the respondents regarded law enforcement and regulatory authorities as ineffective in detecting, investigating and prosecuting securities violations. Continue reading
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Can private banks ever be trusted, after fines of £61n?
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
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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
