| Author | Message | | gchq | | Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2009 5:38 pm Post subject: No "mea culpa" from the bankers |
| From Channel 4 News
Four bankers at a table making their first, and probably last, public appearance since the British banking system crashed. There are apologies aplenty that they didn’t spot the credit crunch coming – but no admission of personal culpability.
Tonight we’ll bring you the exchanges with MPs and look at the consequences and the implications. They are bad for the former chief executive of HBOS, Mr James Crosby (who is revealed to have sacked the top risk manager in the bank after being warned that the risks to the bank were unacceptably high); they are bad too for Gordon Brown who, as chancellor of the exchequer, presided over the endless loosening of regulatory banking strings; and they are bad for all of us for not questioning how these bankers were playing fast and loose with our jobs, our homes and our livelihoods. At seven.
Nick Martin is talking to just some of the people who feel that these bankers have rather more to apologise for than what they’ve offered today.
Watch the lunchtime report:
http://tinyurl.com/d4rx26 | |  | | gchq | | Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2009 6:01 pm Post subject: A convenient resignation |
| Channel 4 News
Rarely has a resignation been so conveniently timed. The exit of Sir James Crosby just before prime minister’s questions this lunchtime spared the really awkward questions about this banker turned gamekeeper.
The former HBOS boss was fingered yesterday as someone who, in the words of Vince Cable, was perhaps more part of the problem than the solution when it came to the banking crisis. Yet he became one of Gordon Brown’s most important advisers and was appointed to the position of number two at the body charged with regulating the conduct of banks and the financial sector.
Tonight, more on the allegations against James Crosby and his insistence that he has done nothing wrong. But perhaps more importantly, where it leaves us. His exit can be seen as perhaps distancing the government from the spread of blame and culpability when it comes to the banking crisis. Yet it was the treasury who decided on the level of regulation and appointed the key people.
So given that bankers, regulators and government are all part of the what might be seen as a systemic failure, who is best placed to look into all this? Indeed, is anyone doing so? Well, not really. We’ll be wondering whether it is time for a more independent, even judicial, inquiry.
Watch the lunchtime report:
http://tinyurl.com/byyrdv | | | | Von Curtis | | Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2009 9:32 pm Post subject: |
| | I saw just a bit of British bankers apolgizing on TV - I bet none of them were from the Bank of England - there seems to be a bank war going on - the central banks around the world are trying to shift the blame to the smaller maybe more independent banks and squeeze them out. | | | | gchq | | Posted: Thu Feb 12, 2009 8:31 pm Post subject: |
| Channel 4 News
MORE BANKING QUESTIONS
Is the government about to lose another banker? There’s innuendo in the air tonight swirling around the head of Glen Moreno, who was appointed to chair the body that keeps an eye on how the bailout bank money is spent, following allegations in the Sunday Times concerning a tax relationship with the offshore tax haven of Lichtenstein.
The Tories have been raising questions as to whether he is a fit and proper person to hold such an office. We’re keen to talk to Mr Moreno tonight – and are talking to his office even now.
Hot on the heels of the unseating of Sir James Crosby, who resigned as deputy chairman of the FSA following revelations about his own banking practices at HBOS, this would be a double embarrassment to the government.
I’m just hearing from our political editor that the treasury has hastened to impress upon us that Mr Moreno’s appointment was only “interim” – he is highly unlikely to apply for the long-term post.
They sound rattled, because they’re also saying if every banker is subjected to such close scrutiny none of them will want to do any job in the public sector.
MPs question Brown:
http://tinyurl.com/d2eg34 | | | | gchq | | Posted: Fri Feb 13, 2009 6:01 pm Post subject: |
| Channel 4 News
LLOYDS SHARES DROP
Lloyds shares have plummeted nearly 30 per cent today after predicting HBOS will post a loss of £10bn pounds for 2008.
Lots of angry Lloyds shareholders.....but what a week it has been for the banks. The beginning of the apologies and more searches for blame. The trail is catching up with all those people involved in financial services and their regulation over the last 10 years.
In a remarkable interview this lunchtime on the News at Noon the former cabinet secretary who was previously permanent secretary at the treasury, Lord Turnbull, told me how everyone – bankers, regulators, politicians - just went along with the radical (and ultimately riskier) changes in how Britain’s banks operated because they were swept along by each other.
What Lord Turnbull describes sounds like a classic version of ‘group think’. Comparing it to the belief Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and fears of the Y2K bug (remember that!!??) he said there were fears of a bubble being started but nobody imagined it would have got as big as it did.
Incidentally the noble Lord had been suggested to us by the cabinet office as an interviewee to defend civil servants accepting freebies. In a robust defence of his colleagues Lord Turnbull took an interesting swipe at a certain Labour politician at the department of business (whose permanent secretary is in for lots of stick over the dozens of hospitality events he accepted in a year).
"You need to think clearly. It must not be too lavish." he said.
"A good starting point is to stay away from private yachts." Of course it might as easily have been aimed at the shadow chancellor.
Watch the interview with Lord Andrew Turnbull: http://tinyurl.com/cau4xk | | | | gchq | | Posted: Tue Feb 17, 2009 6:15 pm Post subject: Lifting the lid on the City |
| Channel 4 News
Well, it has taken kicking, screaming, cajoling, advising and kicking again finally to persuade our bank – the Royal Bank of Scotland, almost 70 per cent taxpayer owned in order to keep it afloat – not to pay its executives vast amounts of bonuses.
The £1bn they wanted to use to do this has been reduced to a mere £175m for some of its investment bankers, a sum which is described as contractually obliged – the bank is not telling us how many people will get how much. In addition, another £160m is being used to reward lesser mortals who have delivered on targets.
Tonight we’re looking at the incestuous culture and the limited gene pool from which people with any influence in the City are drawn. We’ll be talking to someone who has held a senior position in City banking, who is blowing the whistle on the scale of incest and old-boyedness.
Credit crunch reports:
http://tinyurl.com/6dvo2u | | | | gchq | | Posted: Thu Feb 19, 2009 6:03 pm Post subject: Our ever growing I owe you |
| Channel 4 News
I recognise that you are bored rigid with figures but tonight they are just so bad that attending to them is unavoidable.
Basically, our national debt has more than doubled, more or less overnight. In fact there are so many zeros that it is easier to say that it is somewhere around two times our gross domestic product.
And it is constituted partly of our existing debt, partly out of the collapse of tax revenues and partly out of the truly enormous sums we have thrown at rescuing the banks.
As some will have noted from my blog we have effectively nationalised another bank. The Office of National Statistics has acknowledged that both RBS and the enlarged Lloyds are now “classified in the public sector”.
Siobhan Kennedy is on the case.
You can read my blog here: www.channel4.com/snowblog
And introducing our new World News blog: www.channel4.com/worldnewsblog | | | | gchq | | Posted: Sun Feb 22, 2009 7:15 pm Post subject: Brown calls for open and honest banking |
| Channel 4 News
The Gordon Brown soundbite of the day is that bankers must be stewards of our money not speculators with it. The PM is in Germany with other European leaders (meeting ahead of the G20 summit in April) where they have all pledged to make banking honest and open. They claim that every bit of banking, investment and hedge funds will be properly regulated wherever they are in the world.
It is far from clear whether that is remotely deliverable, or whether it will help pull us out of recession. But it signifies action in an era in which politicians need to be seen to be doing something. The next few days are going to be dominated by banking; RBS will reveal its financial situation and the scale of its losses, Lloyds is working out its bonuses, as are Barclays and HSBC, and on Thursday the government will unveil the most important thing of all: the details of its asset protection scheme.
This is the insurance scheme designed to cover the bad debts of those banks that take part, allowing them, in theory, to release more funds for new 'responsible' lending. So what does all that mean for those of us who don't live in the world of high finance? Well, this morning Gordon Brown also signalled he never wants to see the return of 100 per cent mortgages whenever the credit market does start up again. He's asking the Financial Services Authority to look into how new requirements can be brought in to make the cost of 100 per cent mortgages reflect the true scale of risk.
I've been talking to the City Minister Paul Myners, who says we'll actually have to go back to the days of saving up 10 to 15 per cent deposits on our homes. For somebody on £25,000 a year, that means saving around £50,000 for a typical family home in the South East of England. Lord Myners is now the man responsible for delivering the asset protection scheme (the thing being announced on Thursday) so I talked to him about that and whether the government will ever acknowledge its share of blame for what went wrong. | | | | gchq | | Posted: Thu Feb 26, 2009 6:33 pm Post subject: Toxic excuses meet gauntlets of truth |
| From Channel 4 News
The catastrophic state of RBS, once the world’s third biggest bank. Toxic assets that have had to be insured to the sum of £325bn. And this year’s losses the worst ever recorded by a British bank: £24bn.
This is merely the worst of the worst – well, for today anyway. What's also occurring is that the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, has added his voice to that of Adair Turner, head of the FSA, in saying that it was the politicians who kept pushing for an ever lighter touch, demanding that “success should not be punished”.
We have an excellent interview with Mr Stephen Hester, the new chief executive of the RBS bank, who has the misfortune to have to deal with the phenomenal rumpus, not only about the state of the bank but about the fact that the man who led the bank into this mess, Fred “the Shred” Goodwin, is being paid a £600,000 pension every year for the rest of his life effectively from taxpayers' money – and he’s only 50!
The government's asked Sir Fred to hand some of it back - he's just said in a statement the one of their ministers Lord Myners actually approved the deal.
We have also discovered that no fewer than six members of the board who signed off on what the Treasury has called “this outrageous deal” for Fred Goodwin’s pension, are still on the board today. Treasury Minister Stephen Timms, who I spoke to before Sir Fred put out his statement, accepts that this was a gross misjudgement, but would not commit himself on the question of whether these six would be removed in the interests of the good governance of the bank.
Gary Gibbon is on the case, as is Siobhan Kennedy, our business correspondent. We shall be sifting through the toxic excuses with the gauntlets of truth at 7.
RBS loss biggest in UK history:
http://tinyurl.com/dy3xkn | | | | gchq | | Posted: Thu Mar 05, 2009 9:25 pm Post subject: A licence to print money? |
| Channel 4 News
Well, today’s the day we started printing money. This as interest rates go down to half a per cent. “Quantitative easing” has started. We don’t know how much quantity, and we don’t actually imagine it will be easy. But basically the Bank of England is increasing the supply of money in circulation to try to stave off a depression.
It has rarely been tried before – in Japan and in America, in both cases countries with a reserve currency very much stronger than the pound. It could ultimately sink the pound and it could even work. We’ll be discussing this at seven and trying to explain what it is. And Faisal Islam has a major interview with the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King.
MPs have run yet another slide rule over the total farce of Britain’s purchase of Chinook helicopters nearly a decade ago. The order was so incompetent that these vastly expensive machines have lain idle ever since.
And now the desperate need for frontline lift in Afghanistan has forced their rehabilitation, the cost of which has spiralled to more than £400m.
For members of parliament, the language about the scale of the cock-up verges on the intemperate. This is catastrophic wastage of public money, they say. But one wonders whether anyone will be found to have been responsible for it.
Bank to pump £75bn into economy: http://bit.ly/gVKi | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
