The Republic of Ireland’s calamitous recent years of financial crisis and government dysfunction look to be coming to an end, with an economic recovery gathering pace and a new administration that seems…
Tunisia has been hailed as a lone success story among the Arab Spring nations. A relatively peaceful transition with a recent agreement on a new constitution has enabled the country to avoid the bloodshed…
Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, wants to change the way bankers get paid in order to discourage them from taking excessive risk or behaving badly. He has suggested that a big part of…
In times of financial uncertainty and crisis, high stress reactions lead to traders becoming more risk averse, which drives pessimism and further falls in finance, according to a new study. This is because…
Australia’s four pillars policy is widely misunderstood. At heart, it is an anti-bank policy, one which prohibits the large banks from doing what they might like to do and that is to merge. It stops them…
Authorities in New York have announced they are launching an investigation into the manipulation of the world’s biggest financial market – the US$5.3 trillion a day traded in currencies. New York regulators…
News that many of the large banks will continue to pay large bonuses has sparked off another round of public anger. Even the beleaguered RBS hopes to offer some of its top bankers bonuses worth 200% of…
“It takes me about two hours to assemble a team of financial geeks and lawyers to devise a product or a transaction that would bypass any regulation coming our way,” a senior French banker said to me in…
Ed Miliband’s heavily-trailed speech on banking reform was no political game-changer; however, it broadened and deepened his One Nation theme and set out specific policy proposals to help restore Labour’s…
A KPMG report warned last year that the next systemic shock to UK banking could come from an as yet unforeseen event, such as a massive payment outage or a cyber attack. Since the IT systems in most banks…
When the chairman of the ethical Co-operative Bank was recently caught on camera purchasing drugs, it became a major news story. But the links between drug-taking and Wall Street or the City of London…
The EU has made progress on the construction of a banking union, by agreeing on common rules for dealing with failed banks. The downside is that these rules won’t kick in until 2015: the Eurozone faces…
Figuring out why financial crises emerge in seemingly stable economies is tough. Widespread collapses are notoriously difficult to predict - to do so requires a comprehensive view of a complex, interconnected…
Mark Taylor, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick
In the latest big scandal to hit the banking sector, regulators around the world are investigating whether foreign exchange markets have been rigged. At least seven major banks have been caught up in the…
UK banking giant Barclays has revealed plans to lay off 1700 branch staff and shrink its branch network as customers embrace online and mobile banking. The street faces of banks are changing quickly. Where…
A war gaming exercise began in London recently to test financial institutions’ effectiveness against a range of simulated attacks from cyberspace. It was called Waking Shark II, which sounds very exciting…
The chancellor has given away an open secret. The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) will not be split up. Instead the bank, still 81% owned by the tax-payer, will be restructured into and a “good bank” and…
The banking sector in the UK, always dynamic, continues to flex and morph. Newer, smaller banks are growing, desperate to break into a market dominated by a small number of big players. However, despite…
At the World Islamic Economic Forum in London, David Cameron has announced the UK is to become the first non-Muslim country to issue Shariah-compliant bonds and that a special Islamic index will be created…
The Co-operative Bank is no longer. What was once an experiment in working class self-help has become the latest victim of rapid changes sweeping the financial sector. It seems unlikely that the ethical…