At Forbes, I explain how regulatory changes and a difficult trading environment have forced Barclays to consign half of its investment bank to the scrap heap. What is left looks very familiar, though.....
I haven't written a post about WASPI for a very long time. I felt I had said everything I wanted to say, and it had become evident that the WASPI campaign and its offshoots had neither the widespread support nor the legal arguments that they claimed. Labour's proposed £58bn payment to WASPI women contributed to its disastrous defeat at the 2019 General Election. And in 2020, the hardline Back to 60 group's bid to overturn their state pension age rises failed in the Court of Appeal. The Government had no intention of compensating WASPI women for their lost pensions, and there was neither legal nor political means to force it to do so. The campaign seemed, in short, dead in the water. But it seems it isn't, quite. Some years ago, WASPI campaign received legal advice that a challenge to the legislation would almost certainly fail but that there might be a case for maladministration on the part of the DWP. Women would have to make individual maladministration claims and
Dear friends, this is my last post on this site. Coppola Comment has moved to Substack. You can find the new site here . Why the move? Well, Blogger has become increasingly difficult to use. The code generator is buggy and I constantly have to mess around with the HTML to make posts look half decent. I don't have the time for this nonsense. I just need a nice straightforward CMS that doesn't make my life difficult. Also, those of you who subscribed by email will know that for some time now you have not been receiving email notifications. This is because Google turned off Feedburner. Google helpfully said I could download the email list and do notifications myself using something like mailchimp, but I don't have the time for this, either. I want a platform that manages my subscribers and notifications for me. I did consider moving to Wordpress, but I've never really got on with that (it's why I used Blogger). And I also considered Patreon for the subscriber side.
This is a slightly amended version of a keynote speech I gave on 14th April 2023 at the University of Ghent, for the Workshop on Fintech 2023. The crisis that has engulfed crypto in the last year is a crisis of fractional reserve banking. Silvergate Bank and Signature Bank NY were fractional reserve banks. So too were Celsius Network, Voyager, BlockFi, Babel Finance and FTX. And still standing are the crypto fractional reserve banks Coinbase, Gemini, Binance, Nexo, MakerDAO, Tether, Circle, and, I would argue, every one of the DeFi staking pools. All of these are doing some variety of fractional reserve banking. Custodia Bank and Kraken Finance claim to be full-reserve banks – but 100% reserve backing for deposits is both hard to prove and not a guarantee of safety. What do I mean by “fractional reserve banking”? My definition might surprise you. For me, fractional reserve banking simply means that the composition of a bank’s assets is less liquid than that of its liabilities. Fra
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