Retired Member
If anyone needed convincing that interfering with 'proper' lending decisions by forcing banks to lend makes things worse, they need only look at the latest HBOS numbers. Huge increases in bad debts from dodgy loans and yet the authorities here want them to turn the taps on again...? At the moment, a lending banker must surely be asking searching ...
12 December 2008 /regulation /retail Transaction Banking
Elton Cane Digital product delivery at News Corp Australia
Earlier this week The Guardian had an interesting piece on the bonus culture at investment banks. The Financial Services Authority has written to the chief executives of major firms to urge them to review pay policies to ensure they take account of the risks being run by traders. And UBS is already moving in this direction by devising a system th...
12 December 2008 /regulation /wholesale Innovation in Financial Services
Gary Wright Analyst at BISS Research
Despite what you hear and read about SEPA it is a fact that it has failed to achieve any notable volume since it went live. At a recent conference chaired by yours truly a number of eminent speakers from the upper echelons of banking finally agreed in public under examination that there has only been 2.5% of possible volume of SEPA Credit Transfer...
12 December 2008 /regulation /sibos EBAday
Keith Bear Vice President, Financial Markets at IBM
On perusing an email from Lepus some weeks ago I was struck by the title of one piece of their research "VaR, what is it good for!" Having been involved in working with several banks on market risk implementations a decade ago, I remember the mathematical simplicity and purity of VaR models had at the time, the impact that the original Ri...
01 December 2008 /regulation
John Cant Managing Director at MPI Europe Ltd
The demise and subsequent break up of Lehman Brothers will provide strong case study material for many MBA courses, for many years. There are several lessons to be learnt beyond the crucial role of customer confidence in business success. For example, there are the difficulties involved in splitting or decoupling the heavily centralised Lehman IT ...
30 November 2008 /regulation /wholesale MiFID
Atso Andersen Head of Corporate Relations at Aalto University
I attended a Hindu wedding in New Delhi last week. Met a banker from Dubai and asked about real-estate. He said: leveraged, and massively. Leverage was the key word and I saw it. We are slaves of leverage, all of us christians, muslims, hindus, we are all dependent on leverage. Regard this in the context of co-ordinated rate cuts and regulatory re...
27 November 2008 /regulation
Daniel Smith CEO at Raisin Technology Europe and USA
I read an interesting post here yesterday (or was it the day before?) about "forcing banks to lend" and am curious to see if anyone has a similar feeling to myself. As we all know, any well run bank will (or should) study the risk before lending, look at the return, and then take a decision. With the current "crisis" many centra...
25 November 2008 /regulation /retail
New buzz words in the street since the rescue of Citi in US, RBS in UK and UBS in Switzerland involve Darwinian processes, dinosaurs and other apocalyptic analogies. One may ask, are the world largest financial conglomerates the strongest pillars that will remain once the tidal wave sets off, or are they instead to big to adapt? Given the market c...
24 November 2008 /regulation
Notwithstanding the complete ar*e the banks have made, at the macro level, of the world's finances, most bankers at branch level can probably still be relied upon to make sensible decisions about lending to viable businesses. Whilst of course they can be subject to diktats from senior management at the centre as to pricing policy, generally speak...
21 November 2008 /regulation /retail Transaction Banking
Make no mistake about it, UK will recover first. There is after all only a dozen banks for the government to keep afloat, the giant insurance and re-insurance companies that will suffer from the deleveraging of CDS are mostly French, German and Swiss, and the UK government is first to accept to bite the bullet and lead the way into Keynesian econ
18 November 2008 /regulation
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