The commentators 13-11-14...on forex-rigging scandalThere are finally some signs that the banking industry has got the message. Traders have seen some colleagues marched off for questioning. Some face the threat of criminal charges. Managers are conducting the line-by-line forensic analysis of their business that should have started long ago.
- Philip Augar, Financial Times What is particularly disturbing is that most of the offences identified by financial watchdogs were committed after the crisis in the international banking system in 2008 and after billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money was spent bailing out the big banks. We now know that not only did that bail-out fail to prevent the Great Recession, costing countless thousands of British jobs and leading to a fall in living standards, but it did nothing to regulate properly City traders working in a market that has become the Wild West of finance.
- Alex Brummer, Daily Mail Banking profits owe less to mastery of fiendish theories about optimal risk allocation or anything else, and more to an old-fashioned case of what Adam Smith called “a conspiracy against the public”. There has been skullduggery on an industrial scale, from the laundering of Mexican drug funds to aggressive peddling of useless payment protection. The industry is rotten to the core. But six years after Lehman toppled, and two years after Bob Diamond was forced out of Barclays amid the Libor scandal, the protective overgrowth of ideology is still not cleared.
- The Guardian We're in the mood for looking back, so let's recall those primary school arithmetic problems and apply them to this situation:
If it takes 8,000 volunteers three months to assemble and plant 888,246 poppies, how long will it take a similar number of volunteers to pick them and pack them away ready for cleaning and despatch? There is no set answer, but you can bet it's not 24 hours. The poppies won't disappear by tomorrow night. The Telegraph suggested last month that it would take a couple of weeks. In other words, politicians and the Press have delivered to a sentimental public a bonus that it was going to get anyway. Editor's blog A last post for the poppies SubScribe Poppymania Thursday 25 September Judges for the Editorial Intelligence comment awards announced their shortlists today, with ten nominations for the FT, nine for the Times, five for the Guardian, four for the Independent - and two for SubScribe.
The Times and Sunday Times scored a clean sweep in nominations for the main award of commentariat of the year, which will be decided between David Aaronovitch, Camilla Cavendish, Daniel Finkelstein and last year's winner Caitlin Moran. Guardian's Jay Rayner was shortlisted in the food writer category, but said that he did not wish to be considered as that award is sponsored by Tesco. The awards will be presented on November 25. See the full shortlists here Please sign up for SubScribe updates
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