Banks

Wegelin, the oldest Swiss bank, is about to close permanently after pleading guilty in a New York court to helping Americans evade taxes. The bank, established in 1741, has agreed to pay $57.8m (£36m) in fines to US authorities. Wegelin admitted that it helped more than one hundred Americans to hide $1.2bn from the Internal […]

The Swiss bank UBS has agreed to pay $1.5bn (£940m) to US, UK and Swiss regulators for attempting to manipulate the Libor inter-bank lending rate. It is the second major bank to be fined over Libor after Barclays’ was ordered to pay £290m to UK and US authorities in the summer, where CEO Bob Diamond […]

Chronicle of a Job At Barclays Foretold The following is an extract from my new eBook, Lessons From The Financial Markets For 2013 covering Barclays. In fact, as it was written a few weeks before it was announced that former FSA Chief Hector Sants was joining Barclays in a compliance role. The paragraph highlighted in […]

Hard times for big banks. In the US they are making a last minute push to ease the new global liquidity requirements, that would force them to come up with an additional $800bn in easy-to-sell assets under the proposed standards. On the other hand, UK banks are facing the threat of a break-up if they […]

There are a few business axioms that people seldom see coming when looking forward, but almost always happen when wrong-doing has been exposed.  According to reports this morning, UK banks have become these axioms in action. The axioms: Every business that suffers from wrong doing must find a way to make up for the losses […]

Eurozone financial ministers agreed early this morning on a deal to make the European Central Bank the bloc’s banking supervisor, making a step towards a future banking union. The ECB will monitor up to 200 eurozone lenders from early 2014, but one of the main purposes of the reform – to allow the €500bn of […]

Mick Carney, the next Governor of the Bank of England, has suggested that targeting economic output instead of inflation should be the method in an attempt to revive a weak economy. Considering nominal gross domestic product (GDP not adjusted by inflation) would allow central banks to act more aggressively to counter an economic slump. “If […]

Many developing countries are using exchange rates as their key tool for monetary policy instead of stimulating domestic demand, spreading the risk of a war between currencies in the near future.  The big concern of Sir Mervyn King, Governor of Bank of England, points out the necessity for the G20 group to address global imbalances […]

Europe’s largest banking business by market capitalisation, HSBC Holdings plc (LSE:HSBA), has agreed to settle the biggest anti-money laundering penalty in history for a bank, the company announced earlier today. In a statement, HSBC stated it is to pay US$1.92 billion (£1.2 billion) to authorities in the United States and is close to “finalising an […]

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is seldom discussed, but when it speaks, we ought to listen. “As an organization of central banks, the BIS seeks to make monetary policy more predictable and transparent among its 58 member central banks. While monetary policy is determined by each sovereign nation, it is subject to central and private banking […]