Bankers seem detached from reality and common sense in other ways too
A senior banker from Goldman Sachs decided to dig out the basement of his £5m Kensington home and created subsidence hell for his neighbours.
The Daily Telegraph reports that one elderly woman had to be rescued when the doors jammed shut in her nearby flat because of movement in the building. Cracks appeared in basement walls and one neighbour had to call out contractors three times in six weeks to open their front door.
Finally emergency building teams were called out when a pillar holding up the house’s portico started to break under the pressure.
JohnB wrote:Bankers seem detached from reality and common sense in other ways too
A senior banker from Goldman Sachs decided to dig out the basement of his £5m Kensington home and created subsidence hell for his neighbours.
The Daily Telegraph reports that one elderly woman had to be rescued when the doors jammed shut in her nearby flat because of movement in the building. Cracks appeared in basement walls and one neighbour had to call out contractors three times in six weeks to open their front door.
Finally emergency building teams were called out when a pillar holding up the house’s portico started to break under the pressure.
However, Charles Penney, chairman of the local residents association told the paper: “It is a case of people putting economics before common sense. If it costs £1m to do the work, the increase in the property’s value will in all probability be double that.”
Looks like the banker isn't the only one detached from reality and common sense.
Standard Chartered bank illegally "schemed" with Iran to launder as much as $250bn (£161bn) for nearly a decade, a US regulator says.
The New York State Department of Financial Services said that the bank hid 60,000 secret transactions for "Iranian financial institutions" that were subject to US economic sanctions.
It labelled UK-based Standard Chartered a "rogue institution".
They avoided previous US sanctions for trading with Iran by systematically removing Iranian references from all transactions before passing them on the US for checking. They say they did nothing illegal. It was, and probably still is standard practice in many banks. I have certainly heard of the procedure before.
It is just another example of the banks running rings round the regulators (regardless of wether you think the US sanctions against Iran were legitimate) and you wonder if the regulators really cared as long as the banks were reporting massive profits.
RalphW wrote:They avoided previous US sanctions for trading with Iran by systematically removing Iranian references from all transactions before passing them on the US for checking. They say they did nothing illegal. It was, and probably still is standard practice in many banks. I have certainly heard of the procedure before.
It is just another example of the banks running rings round the regulators (regardless of wether you think the US sanctions against Iran were legitimate) and you wonder if the regulators really cared as long as the banks were reporting massive profits.
Whilst I have absolutely no sympathy for any bank whatsoever, whether or not a bank has broken US sanctions is not a standard by which I would necessarily choose to damn them.
Who the F--k do the Yanks think they are? This is political bullshit designed to deflect world attention away from the sins of their own economic system as well as further their own strategic geo-political aims.
Appears its modus operandi is being copied by all the TBTF banks
Investigators in the U.S. and the UK revealed that BCCI had been "set up deliberately to avoid centralized regulatory review, and operated extensively in bank secrecy jurisdictions. Its affairs were extraordinarily complex. Its officers were sophisticated international bankers whose apparent objective was to keep their affairs secret, to commit fraud on a massive scale, and to avoid detection."
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools - Douglas Adams.
(Reuters) - U.S. regulators directed five of the country's biggest banks, including Bank of America Corp and Goldman Sachs Group Inc, to develop plans for staving off collapse if they faced serious problems, emphasizing that the banks could not count on government help.
The two-year-old program, which has been largely secret until now, is in addition to the "living wills" the banks crafted to help regulators dismantle them if they actually do fail. It shows how hard regulators are working to ensure that banks have plans for worst-case scenarios and can act rationally in times of distress.
"We fail to mandate economic sanity because our brains are addled by....compassion." (Garrett Hardin)
"In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, brave, hated, and scorned. When his cause succeeds however, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot."
RenewableCandy wrote:That sounds intriguing...can you give us a synopsis because I haven't got 45 minutes...(urgent Tea and Cakes rendez-vous...)
Basically, if we don't get off our arses we're doomed.
"In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, brave, hated, and scorned. When his cause succeeds however, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot."
Oh Wait! Wasn't LIBOR fixing in full swing then????
