Another day, another banking scandal. Barclays’ LIBOR cheats exploited an arcane and out-dated rate-setting mechanism to fix rates in their favour – which means to your detriment. But just ripping off ordinary people and ordinary investors doesn’t win many points in the Bankster’s Cheat Olympics. If you really want to shoot for those medal places, […]

Barclays bankers fiddle the LIBOR markets – a multi-trillion market – on a heroic scale. Other banks and bankers are being investigated too. Barclays will not be alone in its wrong-doing, and other banks may even have exceeded Barclays’ brazen contempt for truth and right-dealing. So what happens? So far, we’ve seen all the standard […]

There’s a lot of talk about Europe at the moment, but it’s kind of the way you talk about flooding when the waters don’t reach your house. Sure, it must be real tough for the poor saps whose couches are bobbing around in their living rooms — but meantime, what’s for dinner? Unfortunately, that European […]

Just as things were looking bleak, time ticking away, and tension rising … Cesc Fabregas scored for Spain. The tournament favorites hardly daunted their major rivals in their one-all draw against Italy, but they lived to play another day. Meantime, over the same weekend, another rescue act took place. This ‘rescue’ involved €100 billion of […]

It’s a strange world we’re living in. This newspaper reported yesterday that, ‘Britain and the US joined forces to urge Germany to create a central Brussels body that could assume sovereignty over individual countries’ budgets and fiscal policies.’ Under pressure: German Chancellor Angela Merkel doesn’t want a Euro superstate – and can’t afford to finance one anyway […]

‘Failing dismally’: Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman says austerity isn’t working Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and writer for the New York Times, is in London at the moment telling us that we’ve got things wrong. On Tuesday, he gave a lecture at the London School of Economics entitled, ‘Austerity Thy Name is Vanity’. […]

Earlier this week, on 21 May, the Financial Times ran a short piece which opened thus: ‘There has been no official announcement. No terms or conditions have been disclosed. But Greece’s banking system is being propped up by an estimated €100bn or so of emergency liquidity provided by the country’s central bank – approved secretly […]

About four weeks ago, I wrote on my blog that Facebook was heading for a ridiculous valuation when it was launched on the stockmarket. That wasn’t because I think it’s a bad company – pretty clearly a company that makes a billion dollars in profits after only a few years of life is a remarkable […]

You know those summer thunderstorms we used to have? You’d be sitting out in a warm garden somewhere, sipping something cold and white, looking at lightning flashing on the horizon and counting the seconds until you could hear the thunder. Well, it’s like that now, only the gap between the flash and the rumble is […]

I don’t want to crow, but I’ve been predicting this for years: the writedowns of Greek debt, accompanied by swingeing austerity conditions, popular unrest, and (shortly) Greek exit from the Euro. You don’t have to take my word for that: my book, Planet Ponzi, pretty much mapped out the course we’re now taking. But although […]