Extent of the rigging shows it wasn’t a mad moment, it went on for years to cover up UBS’s financial problems
The scale of the UBS Libor-rigging is breathtaking. According to the reports from UK, US and Swiss regulators, nearly 2,000 requests for the Japanese yen Libor to be manipulated were documented, in instant messages, emails and by telephone. Almost every one of them was suspicious.
How many requests were made orally can only be guessed at. The extent of the rigging raises a number of questions and observations: this wasn’t a mad moment for the traders involved. It went on for years – 2005 to 2010 – firstly to generate profits and later to cover up the bank’s financial problems. It was simple – it was not picked up by five internal audits, despite corrupt payments being made to people outside the bank. It was standard behaviour – about 40 traders were involved.
It also proves that Barclays – whose top three executives were ousted as a result of the scandal – was not the worst offender.
At UBS the bosses have already been replaced – not as a result of this shocking behaviour but as a consequence of another scandal altogether – the £1.5bn losses run up by recently jailed London trader Kweku Adoboli.
There is more to come – RBS has also ‘fessed’ up to wholesale dishonesty in its Libor dealings and is negotiating the financial price it must pay. Six other financial firms are also in the frame.
One striking element of the cross-border settlements is the level of fines considered appropriate by the UK regulator and the whopping penalities slapped on these wrongdoers in the US.
UBS has to write a cheque for £160m to the Financial Services Authority – 30% of the UK watchdog’s annual budget, which is provided by a levy on firms regulated.
Another £40m will go to the Swiss regulator, Finma. But £740m is on its way to the US department of justice and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission.
At Barclays the £290m fine was split £230m/£60m in favour of the US regulators.
Why the vast difference for the same offences? The answer is simply that they started in different places. The FSA is ramping up its fines. Offences after 2010 now attract fines of up to 20% of the revenue of the particular business unit.
At least, since April of this year, the public purse now benefits.
Think of it as a welcome tax on errant bankers.
Posted by admin | Posted on 13-10-2012
Category : Business
Tags: bank, bank of england, discussing, extent, financial sector, government, minister, osborne, real, services, turner, week
Lord Turrner was spot on and in line with the pessimism that has been coming from the Bank of England, the Treasury and government ministers
When Sir Humphrey Appleby wanted to scare Jim Hacker off a course of action, television’s favourite mandarin would commend it as “very courageous, minister”. Had the chair of the Financial Services Authority, Adair Turner, run his speech this week by a real-life Sir Humphrey, he would doubtless have been greeted by that familiar sight: raised eyebrow, lips pursed in a moue of displeasure. Not that there was anything wrong with the speech; far from it. It was a pitch to succeed Mervyn King as governor of the Bank of England, but Lord Turner has made those before. And with applications for the post formally closed this week, George Osborne (and the public) can and should expect to hear more stump speeches delivered by men in dinner jackets.
Rather more of an issue for Lord Turner may be the problems he identified in the finance sector and the real economy. Much of what the senior regulator said in his Mansion House address was spot on and in line with the pessimism that has been coming from both the Bank of England and the Treasury – and government ministers too, in their quieter moments. But it may still have been too forthright for the chancellor. The rest of us, however, should welcome the directness and imagination shown by a senior policymaker.
Lord Turner identified two major problems in finance and economics, both of them existential. The banks, he pointed out, are still a long way from sorting out – and the process of shrinking their balance sheets (deleveraging, as it is known) is intensifying the slump. That, he argued, made the current armoury used by policymakers – extraordinary and innovative though it is – close to ineffective. Quantitative easing, he noted, has pushed up growth and inflation only “slightly higher than would otherwise have occurred”. A pretty damning verdict for the policy that is the cornerstone of the Bank’s approach to generating growth. Instead, Lord Turner urged “still more innovative and unconventional policies” – including direct lending to businesses and, it was implied, using money created by the Bank explicitly to finance government borrowing.
Lord Turner should be applauded for his forthrightness in discussing the extent of the slump, and for discussing the extent to which we may have to go to turn things around. This is of a piece with the comments he made a few years ago about the social uselessness of much banking and shadow-banking. But it is probably a little too much reality for Mr Osborne (and possibly any chancellor) to bear. Other candidates to run the Bank have yet to speak, though; it would be well if they showed Lord Turner’s courage and clear-sightedness.
Posted by admin | Posted on 02-09-2012
Category : Business
Tags: antics, daily mirror, digital media, early, epic, extent, harry, information, national newspapers, prince, prince harry, privacy & the media, problem, result, vegas
When Prince Harry’s Las Vegas antics are all over the internet, how can the PCC or any successor make a ruling on what newspapers can publish?
Ladies and gentlemen of this very ad hoc jury … Let us consider the Question of the Epic Boobs – in conjunction, naturally enough, with the matter of Danni Minogue’s early pregnancy. We’ll inevitably come to Harry and strip billiards, but meanwhile the Press Complaints Commission book of what may be deemed relevant case law is open wide.
Ms Minogue, you may remember, complained to the PCC because the Daily Mirror and Daily Record broke the news that she was having a baby much too early for comfort, certainty or taste. They said that they’d seen it on a blog and the Sydney Morning Herald website. The commission promptly slapped them down. “Our code specifically requires us ‘to have regard to the extent to which the information has previously appeared. This is no more than common sense: otherwise any reference online would represent automatic justification for a newspaper to print otherwise intrusive material.”
But when the woman with “epic boobs” found some pictures she’d posted on a social networking site downloaded by Loaded magazine and used in a rather tatty competition to identify her, she too went to the PCC – and got a different result. Hold on to that word “extent” because entering the word “boobs” on Google produced 1,760,000 matches related to her and 203,000 image matches as the “Epic Boobs” girl. “The commission had to pay regard to the extent to which the information had already been made available, and also the context in which it appeared. It judged that it would not have been proportionate to criticise an editor for republishing this material, bearing in mind how – and how far – it had already spread”.
It’s difficult to see any successor body to the PCC, statutory or not, coming to a vastly different conclusion about the “extent” of the problem here. Nobody knows whether St James’s Palace, which has three months to decide whether to make a formal complaint over Harry’s Las Vegas antics, will do so. Nobody can tell whether 3,600 emails and letters from members of the public will trigger an inquiry anyway. And nobody can predict whether the PCC will be around long enough to complete such an investigation or offer meaningful redress. But if you Google something simple, say “Prince Harry photos”, you’ll get 254,000,000 results: which, deep down, is the extent of everyone’s problem.
Posted by admin | Posted on 18-07-2012
Category : Stocks, World News
Tags: behalf, board, data, discovery, exploration, extent, geodynamics, oil, passive, seismic, simba
July 18, 2012, Vancouver, B.C., Canada.
DRUMHELLER, ALBERTA–(Marketwire – July 12, 2012) - At approximately 5:20 p.m., on July 11, 2012, an inmate was assaulted at Drumheller Institution, a medium-security federal penitentiary. The injured inmate was immediately assessed by staff and taken to an outside hospital. The extent of the injuries is unknown at this time. The victim is reported in stable condition.
View post: Correctional Service of Canada: Inmate Assault at Drumheller Institution
According to a recent Tokyo Metropolitan Government survey, 25 percent of foreigners living in Tokyo left Japan temporarily after the March 11, 2011 disasters. That survey seems to imply that many foreign residents did indeed become “flyjin,” a pejorative term coined from “fly” and “gaijin” or foreigner. The survey, however, also confirms that the vast majority of foreigners in Tokyo stayed right where they were — in Tokyo.
At the time, some Japanese and foreign media, as well as the governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, inflamed the controversy by exaggerating the extent of foreigners leaving the country and impugning their motives for leaving. They suggested that in tough times, only Japanese would endure. That quasi-nationalistic suggestion should be set aside for a more dispassionate evaluation of what happened in the aftermath of the disasters, and why.
Read the rest here: ‘Flyjin’ rather few
