TREASURE ISLANDS

Whose fault is the banking and mortgage mess? There is a simple answer, actually

I have quite a few personal friends who are in the financial sector, some of whom are filthy rich. In my experience, most of them deal with all the stuff that’s happened by saying “the whole system is screwed and awful and needs reform but I need to look after my family and children, and I don’t know how to…

Transition Culture interview

with me, here.

Tax Advisers Without Borders – a radical new idea in overseas development assistance

Something I co-wrote today over at the TJN blog . . .

JP Morgan: why the Whale was in London

What a surprise – the trading unit that just blew a $13 billion hole in JP Morgan had been parked offshore, away from the scrutiny and reach of US regulators, to . . . . the City of London. No reader of Treasure Islands will be surprised at that.

The trading unit that destroyed AIG and left US…

Bank of England’s independence was a failure – FT

The FT’s Chris Giles, fresh from his devastating exploration of Mervyn King at the Bank of England, has written another damning article looking at (among other things) what happened when the Labour Party gave operational independence to the Bank of England to set interest rates, a move that was widely praised at the time but in fact represented…

Occupy London tour shows towering inequality

Bloomberg is running a fine story about the City of London, highlighting the Britain’s staggering inequality and the financial driver behind it:

“Income inequality among working-age people has risen faster in the U.K. than in any other wealthy Western country since 1975, according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development. London and the finance industry are the

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Lazy-faire in the Court of King Mervyn

A couple of months ago I wrote that the term laissez-faire might be replaced with the term ‘lazy-faire,’ explaining:

Greenspan was a kind of libertarian policy-maker, and I guess that libertarian policy-making can be a form of intellectual laziness, a sort of ‘don’t bother trying to regulate or control anything much, the market will take care of itself, let’s

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Back again

Apologies for the lack of posts recently. I’ve been both away on holiday, and unwell. I a still recovering, so posting will continue to be slow for a little while, I think.

Me vs. Anthony Travers on the Today programme: economic warfare

I had a bit of a ding dong this morning with Anthony Travers, chairman of the Cayman Stock Exchange, who has been (in my view) probably my noisiest critic. I took Travers to task in Treasure Islands, and he responded by suggesting I was an ‘imbecile’, among other things. This morning the BBC’s flagship Today Programme carried a…

UK big business in ‘fightback’, losing battle to Uncut and Tax Justice Network

From Today’s Observer newspaper, on the Confederation of British Industry (CBI,)

John Cridland, the CBI’s nerdy director general, is hardly the man for a punch-up. But in a sunny Westminster conference room last Thursday, he launched what he bullishly called a “fightback”.

Launching a document called Tax and British business: making the case, it is a lobbying effort.…