Derives financières
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Who came up with the model for excessive pay? No, it wasn't the bankers – it was academics | Aditya Chakrabortty | Comment is free | The Guardian
Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street – the 1987 film that saw through the greed culture. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive Take a big step back. Ignore those sterile debates about how Dave screwed up over Stephen Hester 's pay and where this leaves Ed.
Old mortgages rise from the dead, haunt homeowners | Reuters
(Reuters) - In July 2009, Roy and Sheila Bowers refinanced the mortgage on their suburban ranch home in Topeka, Kansas. The couple wanted to take advantage of the low interest rates that were all the rage at the time. Roy, a truck driver, and Sheila, a former hotel housekeeping supervisor, knew their new loan from Wells Fargo would enable them to save $198.86 a month - a nice chunk to help with gas and groceries. But what the Bowers never imagined was that their old loan, the one Wells Fargo told them was paid off, would resurrect itself, trashing their credit report, scotching their son's student loans and throwing the whole family into foreclosure. All, they say, even though they didn't miss a single mortgage payment.How banks get away with inventing profits | Gordon Kerr | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Abetted by a sloppy bailout structure, bankers now produce financial statements that would make Bernie Madoff blush Both sides of the political divide are in agreement that bailing out the UK's failed banks in 2008 (and Northern Rock in 2007) was the right decision. Taxpayers were told that the worst of all possible worlds would have occurred had banks been allowed to fail. By bailing them out, and by encouraging them to continue to reward executives on pre-crisis pay scales and incentives, politicians prophesied that things would be fine, and management were incentivised to hope that things were fine. The cream of banking talent would remain at the helm of each bank, steadying the ship, ensuring that liquidity would flow through the national economy, which would soon be back on its feet. Both sides are wrong.
What makes individual stockbrokers blow billions in financial markets with criminal trading schemes? According to a new study conducted at a Swiss university, it may be because share traders behave more recklessly and are more manipulative than psychopaths. Two weeks ago, yet another case of rogue trading shocked the financial world when UBS trader Kweku Adoboli was arrested for allegedly squandering some $2.3 billion with a risky and unauthorized investment scheme. The 31-year-old, who had been based in London for the Swiss bank, remains in jail.
Going Rogue: Share Traders More Reckless Than Psychopaths, Study Shows - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International
This paper probes the limits of transparency in monetary policymaking along two dimensions: feasibility and desirability. It argues that, due to limited knowledge about the economy, even central banks (CBs) that are considered champions of openness are not very clear about their measurement of the output gap and about their beliefs regarding the effect of policy on inflationary expectations. Consequently, feasibility constraints on transparency are more serious than stylized models of the transmission mechanism would imply. In addition, no CB has made clear statements about its objective function, including in particular the relative weight on output versus inflation stabilization, the policy discount factor and the shape of losses from the inflation and the output gaps over the possible ranges of realizations of those variables.
The Limits of Transparency
Par RENAUD LECADRE «E n seize ans de salle de marché à la Société générale, je n’ai jamais vu une telle situation, totalement délirante, surtout au vu de la communication de la banque sur les valeurs d’éthique, de rigueur et de professionnalisme.» En adressant ce mail à Michel Péretié, patron de la branche trading et investissement de la Société générale (SGCIB), Ghislain Le Mintier, alias «GLM», signe son arrêt de mort en avril. Un mois plus tard, ce trader est licencié pour insuffisance professionnelle.
A la Socgen, le trader qui en disait trop - Libération
ETFs
Contrairement à la perception outre-Atlantique, les banques américaines sont en train de traverser une longue suite de poursuites judiciaires. Celles-ci visent quatre comportements qui ont, collectivement, été à l’origine de la crise financière de 2008 mais continuent encore à se produire. L’absence de transparence dans les conditions de crédit : il s’agit d’une série d’offres qui ont appâté les emprunteurs hypothécaires en leur proposant deux années de taux d’intérêt alléchants, qui allaient, à partir de 2007, hausser en fonction de conditions de marché sur lesquelles l’emprunteur n’avait aucun éclairage ou visibilité.
Banques américaines : l’étau se resserre sur les fraudes. | Démystifier la finance
City's influence over Conservatives laid bare by research into donations | Politics | The Guardian
The influence of the City over the Conservatives has been laid bare by new research showing that more than half of the Tory party's donations since the general election have come from individuals and businesses working in finance. Hedge funds, financiers and private equity firms contributed more than a quarter of all the Tories' private donations – which this year poured in at a rate equal to £1m a month – the study by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has found. The figures show an increase in the proportion of party funds coming from the financial sector, raising fears that the City's financial influence over the Tories is on the rise as key pieces of legislation are discussed by the coalition government.
Un cauchemar et le mot est faible : absorbés à fignoler leurs accusations en Appel contre Kerviel pour le mois prochain tout en assaisonnant leurs salades grecques pour les rendre plus digestes, Frédéric Oudéa et ses chics types de la Société Générale , pensaient avoir tourné la page des sub-primes américains. Mauvaise pioche. Le 2 septembre, la FHFA (Federal Housing Finance Agency – voir encadré - ) vient de déposer plainte contre 17 banques dont plusieurs filiales US de la Société Générale.
Les détails de la plainte des Etats Unis contre 17 banques dont la Société Générale
Summary Ally Financial Inc., previously known as GMAC Inc., is a bank holding company headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, United States at Tower 200 of the Renaissance Center. With more than 15 million customers worldwide, Ally...
Your Guide To The MASSIVE FHFA Bank Lawsuits
Here It Is: Presenting Goldman's "The World Is Ending So Let's All Profit" Report | ZeroHedge
A few days ago the WSJ made waves by disclosing that Goldman was in the process of recreating another "Abacus", by pitching to clients a global "pain trade" presentation created by Goldman's Alan Brazil, which, among others, speculated that funding needs for European banks would be far, far greater than the IMF-proposed $200 billion, and would in fact be closer to $1 trillion. This emphasis is actually odd, because Goldman focuses as much if not more attention on the end of the Chinese bubble as it does on the end of the European ponzi. It of course also did the usual Goldman thing, which is to allow select clients to piggyback with its prop, pardon flow, desk, in recreating the same fiasco for which it already had to pay a half a billion settlement to the SEC last year. Yet to date, nobody had actually seen a public version of this report....That is, nobody, until now - presenting Goldman's top secret "State of the Markets - Long and Short Risk Strategies"Charles Schwab has sued Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and other banks. The reason? The brokerage claims they conspired to depress Libor rates by understating their borrowing costs. That, in turn, lowered the interest rates on short-term paper that Schwab mutual funds bought from the banks, the suit alleges.
Schwab sues banks for manipulating Libor rates - InvestmentNews
Bonnet d’âne pour le FMI, par Pierre Rimbert (Le Monde diplomatique)
« Recherche institutionnellement orientée », « biais idéologiques », « autocensure », « conclusions préconçues », « faible diversité d’approches théoriques et, plus encore, empiriques », « étroitesse de vues », « cadre analytique inapproprié aux réalités des pays étudiés », « incapacité répétée à citer des travaux de chercheurs locaux »… A tout prendre, il valait mieux pour les têtes pensantes du Fonds monétaire international (FMI) que les feux de l’actualité fussent braqués sur leur directeur général, arrêté à New York le 14 mai 2011, plutôt que sur le dernier rapport de son Bureau indépendant d’évaluation, publié la semaine suivante dans l’indifférence générale.Warren Buffet investit 5 milliards dans Bank of America - LExpansion.com
Bank of America, actuellement confrontée à une crise de confiance à Wall Street, a reçu jeudi le soutien du milliardaire américain et icône des marchés boursiers Warren Buffett , qui va investir cinq milliards de dollars dans l'établissement. "Bank of America est une entreprise solide, bien gérée", a justifié l'homme d'affaires. Selon les termes de l'accord, sa holding Bershire Hathaway va acquérir 50.000 actions préférentielles émises pour l'occasion, à 100.000 dollars chacune, portant un intérêt annuel de 6%. M.Bank of America leaks
spéculation
Regulation & taxation