Apparently, Ben Bernanke lost his iPhone recently. The guy who found it took a screenshot of an exchange between Bernanke and Tim Geithner, with the Fed demanding the Government's overdrawn balance be cleared. The date of the exchange was Halloween 2010, a few days before Bernanke agreed to $600 billion of money to be issued…
“Now then Brasher, what’s all this I hear about a clampdown on bonuses?” Sir Winston Albert Grant, Chairman of MegaBank Corp (MBC) and generally known by his colleagues as WAG, roared across the table at Roger Hughes, the new Chief Compliance Officer for MBC. Roger was called Brasher by WAG because every time he came…
Eric Cantona, the charismatic and gifted French footballer, has ignited the fire to bring down the banking system on 7th December 2010. Here's what he said: "We don't pick up weapons to kill people, to start the revolution… the revolution is really easy to do nowadays. What is the system? The system revolves around the…
I was thinking a lot about the recent news that the FSA has ordered all mobile telephone calls to be monitored for any trader or investment banker using a corporate mobile telephone. Great. It doesn’t seem like such a great idea though, as traders and bankers will just switch to personal mobiles or those of…
Ok, it’s my final work day before jetting off for the annual jamboree that is SIBOS. This year’s SIBOS has three themes: regulation, recovery and rebuilding trust. So, let’s explore these briefly. And, just in case you are not going to SIBOS, you might learn something too as these are my top tips for all…
I guess it's the role of citizens of any country to suffer their supposedly democratically voted leaders, and the role of the media to take the mickey out of them. Now I'm not especially political, but was a little concerned to see this photograph of our esteemed Chancellor George Osborne in last week's papers: …
For much of my professional life I’ve worked for large American corporations. It wasn’t until last weekend that I realised why these corporations were so dysfunctional. The realisation came about because of Mark Hurd’s resignation as CEO of Hewlett Packard, and it just so happened that I used to work with Mark at his previous…
Walking through the City yesterday, I stumbled across a real jamboree of people just by Liverpool Street. Really weird. Lots of stalls selling food and loads of people queuing for what seemed like hours to get some of it. What's going on? This is not normal. Ahhhh … it's just UBS deciding that their canteen…
