What happens when you lynch bankers?

Every calamity in human history tends to have a corresponding scape goat. Often in financial busts it becomes xenophobic, race often plays a strong role, the US Civil war was as much about the dichotomy of the Northern and Souther economies as anything else, while slavery was front and centre it was the fundamental economic difference between a plantation system in the south and a rapidly industrialising economy in the north that helped to draw battle lines. In fact, your average southerner wasn’t a white slave owner, they were a poor white farmer who only made about enough to live on.

In the 1980’s Ireland blamed single mothers, I was still in Los Angles and there the popular blame was against Mexicans. The blame game is nothing new. In the early 1300’s during the Great European Famine they blamed bakers and millers, the Parisians went so far as to tie them up and publicly whip them, the real enemy in that instance was mother nature who delivered three summers of rainfall that caused crops to fail, but you can’t lash …

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Everybody pays, even the innocent

There were many innocent parties to the credit fuelled property bubble, they are generally those who didn’t borrow, or who carried no debt, choosing instead to live frugally, and if they used debt they used it wisely. Many of these people are at the polar ends of the age spectrum, very young (who don’t even have access to credit) or much older (who have paid off their mortgages), something we will all need to get used to though is the fact that everybody is going to pay for the mess left behind, this goes farther than NAMA.

The process I am describing is already under way, the very payments system (our financial infrastructure), is going to be used to generate economic rent from the people of Ireland in order to bring in more profit to banks so that they can repair their balance sheets. This price will be paid by the taxpayer outside of the bailout money already being supplied on our behalf. This will be even paid by people who manage to …

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Why banks support bangers

There have been headlines about the way that AIB underwrote certain loans to Liam Carroll, judge Peter Kelly is of the belief that the security may not be correct because AIB essentially gave him the money in early 2009 on the back of a personal guarantee and some other minor security.

Why would a bank do this? Especially as they were curtailing lending to every other sector of the market? Especially when they were being saved by the taxpayer and had just been bailed out? This isn’t to defend the banks, but to explain the reason why they acted in such a counter intuitive way, any right thinking person would be correct in assuming that they should have been trying to rein in developers, but that is the reverse of what they did, rather they extended more credit to the developer.

Explanation for this is simple, Carroll had brought AIB too far down the rabbit hole for them to turn around and pull the plug, a bank gets to a certain point with a …

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Survey shows Brokers are the most trusted advisers

Research carried out by Nottingham Business School has shown that Brokers are the most trustworthy group of financial advisers.

The post below is taken from Mortgage Strategy which published the findings:

Brokers and advisers have come out on top in a consumer survey on trust within the financial services industry. Nottingham University Business school has put together the latest Trust Index on behalf of the Financial Services Research Forum which measures how trusting consumers are of the industry.

It found that brokers and advisers received the highest rating on trust and trustworthiness at 81.67.

Brokers and advisers have consistently been ranked the most trusted among financial services firms though have experienced a marginal decline this year. Findings in the latest study, which has been running since 2005, rank independent brokers higher than tied ones.

Banks, life insurance companies and credit card companies received the lowest ratings, at 73.96, 72.69 and 71.55 respectively.Overall the sector earned a trust rating of 75.02, and was deemed more trustworthy than institutions such as the National …

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The errors of compensation

One of the most pointed arguments that we hear about is that of bankers pay, some people have even started to refer to them as ‘banksters’ instead of ‘gangsters’. The reality is that both the industry and the shareholders and everybody else got it terribly wrong, even the corporations with their internal and agent remuneration models got it wrong. We were rewarding short termism in a long term game, something akin to having a footballer who has to play the full 90 mins but we base all their pay on the first five minutes.

On one hand the general mass of decision makers didn’t see the financial crisis coming, granted, there were some who were shouting it from rooftops, in some cases those same people have predicted 15 of the last 2 market meltdowns (our most well known one began calling it from late 1999), with others they were just plain ignored. The best analogy I have heard so far came compliments of a very respected colleague with over 40 years of banking experience …

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