Shaping the future of finance
It’s been a difficult time for City bankers, what with all the flak over bonuses and easy money after almost bankrupting the world. The longest lasting row relates to bonuses and remunerations packages. This hit the headlines a year ago, and was debated here with the arguments for and against. A year later, and the…
After West Side Story, the Sharks got over the Jets and are now targeting the Gorillas. Actually nothing to do with music or film, we’re talking banks. Back in the 1950s you had large banks (Sharks) being run around by small banks (Jets) who were nimbler and quicker … so the large banks acquired them…
I’m sitting in the house. It’s snowing. Look. This is big news. We don't get snow in Britain anymore. Global warming saw to that. So when it's snowing, it's major news headlines. Non-stop BBC reports saying: "it's snowing". And so it's snowing, and Britain has stopped. Literally. Everything has closed down. We couldn't even get…
After various predictions yesterday, including the return of Glass-Steagall and a Chinese bank buying an American or European one, today it’s the turn of technology. There are lots of questions about technology, such as: Will Google make us stupid? Will we live in the cloud or the desktop? Will social relations get better? Will the…
Back in January, I made five firm predictions for banking in 2009. Those predictions were: More major European and American banks disappear There will be some spectacular failures in the BRIC economies A Global Financial Regulatory Body is formed The US will drop IFRS Solvent banks gain major market share. So what happened? 1) More…
In the dialogue of the past week or so, an interesting theme has emerged. The theme is globally harmonised rules. In fact, there appears to be a tectonic plate shift towards some form of global neutrality. What I mean by this is that historically, the English have disliked the French and vice versa; the Americans…
Just back from Athens at a conference on retail banking with the star attraction being yours truly … well, I thought I was the star attraction until the post-lunch heavyweight speaker Sir Terry Leahy, Chief Executive of Tesco, turned up … I remember hearing Tim Mason, Tesco's Marketing Director, back in 1997 talking about internet…
