Banking

Boris Johnson is the Spectator’s diarist this week, and as you’d expect, his piece in tomorrow’s magazine is full of wonderful Borisisms including cyclists who ‘wave their bottoms at each other like courting pigeons’ and ‘luscious gold doubloon’. But the Mayor of London also launches an attack on America and the way ‘some New York regulator’ has set upon Standard Chartered. He writes: I mean, what is all this stuff about Standard Chartered? This British bank has generally enjoyed a high reputation for probity (as these places go) until yesterday, when some New York regulator apparently denounced Standard as a ‘rogue institution’. Well, if people have broken the law of

The difficult birth of the parliamentary inquiry into Libor and banking standards continued today with a controversy over which members of the Treasury select committee have been appointed to it. To general surprise, Andrea Leadsom, one of the better questioners on the committee, has been left off. This is particularly odd given that she is a former banker with real knowledge of the industry. John Mann, the pugnacious Labour MP, has also not made the cut. He has responded by labelling the coming inquiry a ‘whitewash’. What makes Leadsom’s omission particularly odd is that the Tory MP selected to join Tyrie on the inquiry is Mark Garnier, who is also

So Labour ministers did not ‘lean on’ the Bank of England to encourage lowballing of Libor rates, according to Paul Tucker. The Deputy Governor of the Bank told the Treasury Select Committee this afternoon that he had held conversations with officials about how able Barclays was to fund its operations. This is the exchange between Pat McFadden and Mr Tucker. McFadden asked whether any minister had tried to ‘lean on’ him over Libor: ‘Absolutely not.’ Asked whether Shriti Vadera had leant on him: ‘I don’t think that I spoke to Shriti Vadera throughout this whole process.’ Ed Balls? ‘No’ Other ministers? ‘No’ He confirmed that the ‘senior official’ that he

There are, though partisans don’t want to admit it, problems with both a judicial inquiry and a parliamentary inquiry into the Libor scandal and the wider culture it has revealed. A judicial inquiry would drag on and, judging by the Leveson Inquiry, there’s no guarantee that the judge would understand the industry he’s meant to be examining. But, as yesterday demonstrated, the standard of questioning at any parliamentary inquiry is going to be patchy.   John Thurso, a Lib Dem member of the Treasury select committee and one of the most respected MPs, has been out floating a compromise solution. His idea is that the Joint Committee should have the

George Osborne will formally unveil the government’s banking reforms in a speech at Mansion House later this evening. The reforms are in line with the recommendations of Sir John Vickers’s Independent Banking Commission (ICB), as laid out by the Treasury, which published this White Paper earlier today. For those who’ve forgotten, Vickers suggested splitting retail and investment banking through a Glass-Steagall-type ‘ring-fence’ mechanism that would protect retail, SME deposits and overdrafts while commanding that the ring-fenced part of the bank is not dependent on other departments for liquidity. This, it is hoped, will ensure that the taxpayer is insulated from bailouts in the future, which is, obviously, a key political

Greece is the centre of European attention, but as George Osborne met with other EU finance ministers today there was another issue bubbling in the background — Basel III. This had been brewing for a while and is yet one of those matters that threatened to isolate Britain from the rest of the EU (though some would argue this is a good place to be). The Chancellor this morning appears to have agreed to the Basel III accord, which stipulates the amount and quality of capital that banks are required to keep. But this was after much haggling — and an Osborne outburst where he said signing on to the