Of all the currency arrangements cited in the debate over the future of Scotland’s currency, the ones conspicuously missing are those closest to home. While supporters and opponents of Scottish independence…
The 2007-2008 banking crash ushered in an era of austerity and pay freezes, but bank executives have continued to enjoy disproportionate rewards even though their institutions have been bailed out by taxpayers…
Imagine having to wait seven years before you could be sure that what you were properly paid for your job. If it sounds like a bad deal then maybe it’s time to spare some empathy for bankers at UK financial…
When the European Central Bank sent markets reeling yesterday with moves designed to stimulate growth, the 24 people who made that decision could remain comfortable that their exact arguments and misgivings…
The effective death of the forward guidance strategy offered by the Bank of England came with the announcement in early February that there would be a switch to a less quantitative approach. Dubbed by…
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…
When financial markets stood on the verge of collapse in the summer of 2008, two of the world’s most important central banks, the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, began considering unorthodox…
Like many Canadians to achieve high office in his country over the past half-century, Mark Carney came from an ordinary, middle-class background. And like his two immediate predecessors as governor of…
Many critics of the coalition government’s “Plan A” argue that it should deviate from deficit reduction plans to instead stimulate growth via additional infrastructure spending. Recent advocates of this…
The outgoing Bank of England governor Mervyn King has presided over a huge economic crisis. His parting gift is the claim “a recovery is in sight” that the UK might achieve economic growth of even 1% this…
One certainty about economic forecasts is that, almost certainly, they will prove to be incorrect. The best forecasters can hope for is not to make systematic errors – to get it right on average – and…
Members of the British Treasury Select Committee, US congressional investigators, state attorney generals and class actions lawyers who are investigating just who knew what and when in the sprawling investigations…
The United Kingdom has had a remarkably poor track record in prosecuting serious economic fraud. In part, this can be traced to deficiencies in the toolkit available to the Serious Fraud Office, a fact…
The sense of frustration and despair within the British government and regulatory agencies over the behaviour of Barclays in submitting patently false returns to the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR…