On Tuesday two US hedge funds took control of the Co-operative Bank and in effect ended its 170-year history as Britain’s largest mutual. Yesterday an aggressive hedge fund, deceptively entitled The Children’s Investment (TCI) Fund, acquired the largest stake behind the government in the Royal Mail. It is led by a man known for his […]
Posts Tagged ‘Regulation’
Hedge fund control of Co-op Bank & Royal Mail should never be allowed to happen
Oct 24th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.
Government pretends crackdown on tax avoidance with hand deliberately tied behind its back
Jun 3rd, 2013 by Michael Meacher.According to the Boston Consulting Group, Britain now has just over 1,000 ‘ultra-high net worth households’, i.e. those with more than $100m (£65m) in private financial wealth, excluding property. Much of this will be stored in tax havens, and most of it will have been filleted by expensively-paid lawyers and accountants to ensure that next […]
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Latest row over rigged oil markets shows UK regulators are utterly feeble
May 29th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.The EU is not exactly the most popular institution currently in Britain, but it has demonstrated its mettle in taking on the Big Oil corporates when successive UK regulators have equally demonstrated their utter uselessness. In moves ominously reminiscent of the banks’ Libor rigging scandal, the EU’s leading anti-trust authority has raided the oil majors […]
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UK financial regulators – forget it, what a joke
Dec 31st, 2012 by Michael Meacher.After a blizzard of revelations of financial wrongdoing over this last year, without parallel in recent history, what do the following have in common? Barclays forced to pay $360m over its manipulation of Libor, HSBC fined $1.7bn for maoney-laundering and flouting sanctions, Standard Chartered made to pay $667m over breached in sanction laws, BP penalised […]
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UK regulators are next to useless
Nov 23rd, 2012 by Michael Meacher.The failure of the Bank of England over Libor, the failure of the FSA over the mis-selling scandals (pensions and then Payment Protection Insurance), the failure of the police over phone-hacking, the failure of OFWAT to ensure the water companies invested to upgrade water supply and sewerage schemes, the failure of any regulator to bear […]
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The scandal of PPI: where were the regulators?
Oct 30th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.Even as we have got used to the iniquity of the banks, the latest revelations still take the breath away. The scale of the payment protection insurance (PPI) mis-selling scandal is truly gigantic. The aim behind PPI was to cover borrowers’ loan repayments if they fell ill or lost their job, but it developed into […]
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Why are the Tories so coy about a judge-led inquiry?
Jul 6th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.Parliament was at its worst yesterday. The mud wrestlers Osborne and Balls were so dementedly determined to lay toxic blame on each other for the shocking LIBOR scandal that the City escaped with hardly a bruise to its name. The difference between a judge-led inquiry and a special parliamentary select committee inquiry is not that […]
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Labour after LIBOR
Jul 2nd, 2012 by David Osler.If anyone out there is still making the intellectual case for further banking deregulation, they are keeping strangely quiet right now. And yet for the longest time, an automatic presumption in its favour constituted the prevailing orthodoxy among Conservative and New Labour politicians alike. Last week’s revelations about Barclay’s complicity in rigging the London Interbank […]
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Be angry at bankers, be angrier at economists
Jul 2nd, 2012 by Ann Pettifor.Like millions of others I am outraged by the LIBOR scandal; the wrongdoings of the ‘submitters’ and other traders at Diamond’s Barclays Bank and their fellow travellers at the British Bankers Association. Which is why we at PRIME economics launched a government e-petition calling for a judicial public inquiry into the wrongdoings of banks, and for […]
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Banks need not just a few sackings, but wholesale restructuring
Jul 1st, 2012 by Michael Meacher.It’s not often one agrees with the Institute of Directors (IoD), but on this occasion they are right (as far as it goes) to say: “It is high time for a clear-out of the leaders who created this mess, and the should be replaced with new blood”. From the IoD’s point of view no doubt […]
