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This was a question posed to me by Sky News, and the answer is: however much you want to report. This is based upon the fact that there are lies, darned lies and statistics, and you can manipulate the spend, exposure and loss for each taxpayer any which way you choose. For example, the National…

I don't like using acronyms like GFC, the Global Financial Crisis, but it makes sense having just found a really interesting paper by Andy Haldane, who will speak at the Financial Services Club next April.  Andy is the  Executive Director for Financial Stability at the Bank of England, and the paper is co-written with Sujit…

I don't like using acronyms like GFC, the Global Financial Crisis, but it makes sense having just found a really interesting paper by Andy Haldane, who will speak at the Financial Services Club next April.  Andy is the  Executive Director for Financial Stability at the Bank of England, and the paper is co-written with Sujit…

So today marks the start of the bank reporting season in the UK which, based upon last week’s results in the USA and Europe, will be pretty bleak too. First, we have HSBC which is a mixed bag of news. According to the Telegraph, HSBC will report “a profit for the first six months of the…

I keep thinking about stellar service and what it could mean. Very rarely do you experience stellar service these days. With airlines, it’s a pain to fly.  The airport experience is degrading and the flight itself is no longer exceptional, even in the best class airlines, thanks to the loss of business in recent years…

We talk all the time about too big to fail, alternatively known as TBTF or 2B2F, but is there another side to this equation of the GFS (Global Financial Crisis) which could be called TSTS or 2S2S? TSTS is too small to succeed, and it strikes me that the financial industry has squeezed out almost…

It seems like a long bleak summer in the financial markets, as banks are reporting dire results.  It’s a combination of investment banking in the second quarter suffering serious damage across all fixed income desks, along with the Eurozone and American debt crises. There is no certainty in such times. For example, banks that usually…