The Great Debate UK
from The Great Debate:
Time for a shareholder revolt
(James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own)
There are encouraging signs that shareholders are becoming more assertive in defending their interests.
The Financial Times reported on Monday that some of Britain's largest institutional shareholders - including Standard Life, Legal & General and M&G - are working on a plan to bypass investment banks by creating a club to underwrite new issues of equity by small and medium-sized British companies, a move that could save hugely on fees.
What, you may wonder, took them so long?
Second only to taxpayers, investors have been the great patsies of the financial crisis, paying massive costs to a financial services industry which has, to put it mildly, not served them well.
Activist shareholders and investors could be a key force in fixing what is wrong with the financial system. Unleashing their power to act in their own best interests should be a main thrust of new regulation.
Equities may now be a better bet
- Edward Menashy is chief economist at Charles Stanley. The opinions expressed are his own. -
Not exactly shock and awe as the MPC keeps base rates on hold at 0.5 percent while the most recent financial surveys have been unanimous in expecting a no change decision for some time now. It was always going to be an MPC meeting to discuss whether or not to persevere with quantitative easing. The difficulty for the MPC is that it is too early to judge the effectiveness of the quantitative easing. Clearly the Bank of England would prefer to wait at least until it publishes new quarterly growth and inflation forecasts to explain how it wishes to proceed.
from The Great Debate:
Beware Goldman’s “dutiful” TARP repayment
(Republished to clarify time period of data in fifth paragraph)
Patriotism, as Dr Johnson once observed, is the last refuge of a scoundrel. So when you hear words like "duty" drip from the lips of a senior executive at Goldman Sachs, you instinctively count the spoons.
You'd be right to do so too. Chief financial officer David Viniar's observation that Goldman has a duty to repay the money it received last autumn from the U.S. government as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program may be marginally less cynical than the apercu flung out recently by his boss, Lloyd Blankfein, that investment bankers should be paid less and shouldn't be rewarded for failure.
