Subscribe to Dollars & Sense magazine. Recent articles related to the financial crisis. Essential Reading from Yesterday's FTIn case you missed it, due to Friday night carousing, or whatever...--Whistleblower contacted US regulators (should they even be called this anymore?) on fraudster Sir Allen Stanford five years ago. --Banking editor Peter Thal Larson writes that the UK plan for Royal Bank of Scotland amounts to nationalization in all but name, "maintaining the fiction that the ailing bank is anything other than fully state-owned." This certainly has relevance in light of US policy with regard to Citi. --The excellent Gillian Tett on how CDOs may be worth even less than the pitiful estimates bandied about these days. And, in a point too rarely rarely made in the financial press, "as the zeroes relating to writedowns multiply, a peculiar--and bitter-- irony continues to hang over these numbers. Notwithstanding the fact that bankers used to promote CDOs as a tool to create more "complete" capital markets, very few of those instruments ever traded in a real market sense before the crisis--and fewer still have changed hands since then." Labels: bailout, CDOs, financial crisis, Financial Times, Gillian Tett, Peter Thal Larsen, Royal Bank of Scotland, Sir Allen Stanford Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). What Lovely Weather for a Bank Run...From today's Guardian. A bank run in offshore tax shelters. Beautiful.Run on Stanford banks in wake of fraud charges People queue to withdraw deposits in Antigua, Panama and Venezuela amid fraud case against Twenty20 cricket mogul Staff and agencies guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 18 February 2009 18.12 GMT Hundreds of people in Antigua queued today to withdraw money from banks linked to Sir Allen Stanford, the Twenty20 cricket mogul and US financier, after being panicked by the 8bn pound fraud charges against his company. There was a run on two branches of the Bank of Antigua, owned by the Texan billionaire's Stanford Financial Group. The banks have not been linked to the allegations of fraud lodged at a federal court in Dallas yesterday. In Panama, bank regulators said they had taken over the local affiliate of Stanford Financial Group after a similar run on customer deposits. Hundreds of Venezuelans mobbed local offices of Stanford International. It was the second day that long lines formed at offices in Venezuela, people with investments at the company said. Venezuelans have an estimated $2.5bn invested in Stanford International, the country's banking regulator has said. Read the rest of the article Labels: offshore banks, Sir Allen Stanford, Stanford Financial Please consider donating to Dollars & Sense and/or subscribing to the magazine (both print and e-subscriptions now available!). |
