They Blog For You

The appearance of Bob Diamond this week in front of the Treasury Committee should be explosive.   There are two issues.   Do the bankers see themselves as an elite who are not subject to the rules and constraints that the rest of society have to abide by?   And are the bankers willing [...]

Wherever the buck stops, it isn’t here.   BP (we have just learnt from a WikiLeaks cable, and wouldn’t have known otherwise) had a blow-out and giant gas leak in the Azerbaijan sector of the Caspian Sea just 18 months before their Gulf of Mexico disaster.   It was largely hushed up at the [...]

If you’re going to commit a wrong today, it’s best to make it a really big wrong, so then you’ll probably get off scot-free.   Consider the news of the last week.   The financial regulator FSA investigating the RBS banking debacle which cost UK taxpayers £40bn concluded that the bank was [...]

The FSA announcement today that it is taking no action against Fred Goodwin or RBS tells you a lot about the state of Britain today.   The two biggest disasters of the last decade are the Iraq War and the financial cataclysm.   In terms of the UK involvement in these episodes the two [...]

The Gulf of Mexico saga which may – or may not – be now coming to an end has more compelling implications than has been realised.   It’s not just that BP has suffered a catastrophic accident, has already paid out £2.5bn in clean-up costs, is facing even bigger compensation claims [...]

The British seem to regard homicide when committed by a corporation as rather different from ordinary murder.   It’s true that companies don’t want or intend to kill people (unless of course they’re arms manufacturers), but how should we regard (a) bribing officials of a non-Western country to import a fuel [...]

Lord John Browne, Sun King of casino capitalism, Blair’s favourite businessman and a High Court liar, is the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.   The qualities needed – if indeed such an appointment is required at all – are personal integrity, an unblemished record, and an [...]

Given that the bankers’ malfeasance is the root cause of the present economic misery, which with going-for-broke spending cuts about to be inflicted will soon get much worse, it seems almost unbelievable that, 3 years on, next to nothing has been done to avert yet another (possibly greater) crash.   [...]

As I said on Newsnight yesterday, Obama is attacking BP, not Britain.   He’s reacting exactly as we would if an American oil rig had blown up in the North Sea and a huge oil slick expanding by 40,000 barrels a day (8 times worse than the Exxon Valdez disaster in [...]

The news this weekend abounds with conflicts of interest: *  Insider dealing (making a killing in buying or selling shares by using information to which one is privy inside an organisation, but which is not known to the public outside) persists in the City of London on a huge scale.   There [...]

The two current big environmental disasters say it all.   BP has contaminated huge stretches of the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana, and now its shares have lost a third of their value (a fall of $40bn), the company is subject to an ‘aggressive’ criminal investigation led by the US [...]

The real lesson of the unravelling Gulf of Mexico fiasco is that the mega-corporations abuse their power, if given half a chance by light-touch regulation, just like the banks.   And the costs of dealing with that abuse of power can well run into hundreds of billions of pounds. Why did the [...]

Why such fuss about the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico?   True, the leakage is large, but still nowhere near the size of previous oil spills.   So far at least 60,000 tons have leaked from the Deepwater Horizon explosion, but the Gulf War oil spill (1991) involved 1.4 [...]

It has just been reported that the Wall Street bank, Lehman Brothers, in its final days in September 2008 set up accounting ‘gimmicks’ which falsely gave the impression that its balance sheet was $50 billions stronger than it actually was.   and that the auditors, the UK accountancy firm, Ernst and [...]

The Guardian story about the 42 million green bulbs sent http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/07/energy-lightbulbs-wasted-lax-regulation to British homes under the CERT (carbon emission reduction scheme) in the last quarter of last year, though few customers had asked for them, illustrates how devious and manipulative comopanies are when left to their own devices in an [...]