2013 is tipped, if not as the Year of the Dragon, then as the Year of UKIP, which only goes to show how disoriented and dysfunctional the UK political system has now become. Their philosophy – the country’s going down the drain, immigration and gay marriage show how far it’s been torn from its solid traditions, […]
Posts Tagged ‘The City’
The proposed reform of LIBOR will still fail
Oct 7th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.Martin Wheatley, the head of the new proposed Financial Conduct Authority which is supposed to regulate and prevent wider issues of malfeasance in the City than the FSA was able (or rather, unable) to deal with, recently had this to say about the LIBOR (London Inter-bank Offered Rate) which acted as the benchmark for $300 […]
FSA takes on City chancers – oh yeah! and only 6 years too late
Aug 15th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.Wow! “We need to have a low tolerance for firms that consistently bump along the bottom”. With a warning like that from the new head of enforcement and financial crime at the FSA, Tracey McDermott, the Big Five banks must be……………….laughing all the way to the bank. We’ve heard all this sort of thing before: mistakes […]
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 […]
Cameron’s No 1 priority: protecting the City of London
Dec 9th, 2011 by Michael Meacher.How does Europe manage to do it? It’s demolishing the Tory party far more effectively than the Labour Party is. Can you believe it – Cameron is going to Brussels this weekend to save one thing – the City of London. No other industry, not the rest of us – only that part of the […]
Why hedge funds do better than bent bookies
Jul 13th, 2011 by David Osler.Hedge funds have got one major advantage over bent bookies. In their case, race fixing is entirely above board. Let me expand on this point, by way of an analogy for what has been happening in the Irish, Greek, Portuguese and Italian economies of late. Let’s say you take a bet on a horse to […]
Osborne shares: sell now
Jan 7th, 2011 by Michael Meacher.After yesterday’s champagne-popping as the FTSE-100 rolled past the 6,000 mark, share prices surged, and the Tory press hailed the New Year as the turning point of recovery, comes the cold truth of the next day’s dawn. There is a very real risk that a febrile recovery in the UK-US will be killed off by […]