It was more a loosening of legislation and breaking down the barriers between retail and investment banking plus central banks cutting interest rates to avoid/lessen recession at the turn of the millennium. But the creation of credit or a pyramid of credit was a solution to the structural impasse of capitalism in the 1970s: over [...]
Brown’s “big” proposal to tax financial transactions – the so called Tobin tax – has been met with opposition by almost all the finance ministers of the G20. The reason is obvious; it actively discourages the trading of financial assets. It is this trading in 2009 of assets on the back of a new financial [...]
The announcement that £31.3 billion more was to be given to the banks means more cuts in jobs and public services for us. It also, points to the weakness of the banking system once the super investment banking profits, made from a huge rally in financial assets since March of this year, have been stripped [...]
The government has spent about £150bn over the last year bailing out RBS, HBOS and Lloyds. This has taken the form of being sold shares in these companies and in return giving the banks cash to cover losses and bring their capital (cash) up to regulatory required levels. In addition the government through the Bank [...]
Over the last two weeks there has been lots of telling economic and financial data from which some commentators have drawn the conclusion that the worst of the economic and financial crisis is over. We set out here to examine this data and determine if these commentators are right by looking at the banks, stock [...]
In a classic asset stripping exercise the government has broken up the Dunfermline Building Society. Acting as asset strippers they have sold off the good parts to the Nationwide and given the toxic parts to us the public. The old mutual business of deposits with mortgages backed by these deposits has been bought by Nationwide [...]
The £250bn insurance of Lloyd’s toxic assets is another con that the tax payer will pick up billions of pounds of losses for. Lloyd’s are paying for the insurance by printing £16bn worth of shares and selling them to the government. They then give the government back this money to pay for this insurance! In [...]
The government’s announcement of another £75bn to be spent on buying government and corporate bonds is in effect a bank bailout right across the banking sector. The money is being printed and will used to buy these bonds from next Wednesday. But the only organisations that hold these bonds are bank and pension and insurance [...]
The ludicrous pension being paid to the former RBS’s chief Fred Goodwin hides the scale of the problems at the bank and the further money being given to bail it out by the government (us). RBS reported a statutory loss of £40bn which falls to £24bn if technical issues relating to the acquisition of Dutch [...]
HBOS — the mortgage lender Lloyds took over in January — suffered a 2008 statutory loss of 10.8 billion pounds, hit by 9.9 billion pounds of losses on decaying corporate loans, rising homeowner bad debts and credit market exposure.The corporate loans area contributed heavily to the losses. These loans were concentrated with property developers, property [...]
