President Obama’s call to make banks shed risky trading – effectively a new Glass-Steagall Act – is not off the UK agenda, despite being dismissed by government ministers. The architect of the plan, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, is coming to the House of Commons to outline his plan.
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Nevermind that the Bank of England kept secret for a year its massive loan to HBoS and RBS (LON:RBS), why on earth did it choose to break its silence on the day Lloyds Banking Group (LON:LLOY) announces its record rights issue?
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The government’s promise of three new banks looks attractive for an industry that has retreated to a Big Four offering little competition. But one of the three newcomers isn’t new and the other two are tiddlers.
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If banks shouldn’t be “too big to fail” how small must they be before we allow them to collapse? It’s the question the Bank of England’s governor must answer.
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Dare one ask, amid all the comment to mark the year since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, were the financial regulators wrong in refusing to rescue the bank?
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Two years on from the run on Northern Rock in September 2007 and Lloyds Banking Group (LON:LLOY) should be cursing the regulators for blocking its bid to rescue the mortgage bank. Lloyds Banking Group would have lost the whole of the £1.7bn bid price and more – but still saved that sum many times over.
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If the Financial Services Authority is to disappear after the general election, then chairman Lord Turner seems determined to destroy the financial services industry first. Not only does he propose taxing it into oblivion, he thinks Britain would benefit from being less dependent on the sector.
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Stephen Hester is set to become Britain’s first £10m nationalised industry boss and all he has to do is double the share price of Royal Bank of Scotland. In a bear market and from a bombed out value, that surely can’t be that hard?
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Nevermind whether the government wanted Sir Victor Blank to chair Lloyds Banking Group; why would he want to head a nationalised industry?
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ABNAmro and HBoS have both brought down the banks that bought them but they are completely different. Royal Bank of Scotland’s mistake was to overpay for a good bank; Lloyds’ error was to buy a lousy bank.
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