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Welcome to Peston’s Picks - the home of my reports and analysis of the issues in business that matter to us all
4 hours ago
The parliamentary commission on banking standards believes that banks let us down so comprehensively in the boom years that led to the great crash that what's required is a complete cultural overhaul.
And that, in turn, needs one reform that is simple to understand but really hard to put into practice - bankers need to be clear about their responsibilities and held properly to account when things go wrong.
07:44 UK time, Monday, 17 June 2013
The Co-operative Bank is to be floated on the stock exchange as part of its £1.5bn rescue (as I disclosed last night).
This will be seen as ending its mutual status - although, in fact, that isn't quite right, because although Co-op Bank is owned by a mutual, Co-op Group, the bank itself is a PLC.
23:32 UK time, Sunday, 16 June 2013
Robert added analysis to:
The Co-op will raise much of the £1.5bn of precious capital it needs from what is known as a "bail in", or converting bonds - loans to the group - into shares which will be listed on the London Stock Exchange.
This contrasts with the many bank "bail outs" of 2007-8, in which desperate banks were kept alive by injections of funds from the public sector.
22:11 UK time, Sunday, 16 June 2013
The Co-operative Group has reached agreement with the City regulator that the hole in the Co-op Bank is around £1.5bn, I have learned.
This shortfall in capital, the funds all banks have to hold as a protection against losses, is near the upper end of expectations. An announcement is expected early Monday.
16:55 UK time, Thursday, 13 June 2013
Here is why RBS's board negotiated the departure of Stephen Hester.
A month ago, the chairman of UK Financial Investments, Robin Budenberg, told the chairman of RBS, Sir Philip Hampton, that the Treasury wanted to begin the privatisation of the bank at the end of 2014.
08:23 UK time, Thursday, 13 June 2013
And another thing about Royal Bank of Scotland.
I have learned that the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards has watered down a proposal for the residual £40bn-ish of bad assets of RBS to be hived off and kept in the public sector, as a precursor to the rest of the bank being privatised.
17:53 UK time, Wednesday, 12 June 2013
There have been fears in the Treasury for some months that Stephen Hester would quit as chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland.
In the event, he is leaving by what is described by a Treasury official as "mutual agreement" - because the chancellor and the chairman of RBS, Sir Philip Hampton, both felt this huge semi-nationalised bank is entering a new phase.
10:25 UK time, Wednesday, 12 June 2013
Recent sharp movements in bond, stock and currency markets have put central banks on warning that investors have become dangerously addicted to cheap money, and of the risks of curing the addiction.
Here is what we know:
07:54 UK time, Tuesday, 11 June 2013
In a week when MPs and Lords are finalising a report on how to improve standards in banking, it is embarrassing for Lloyds that it has been accused of failing to show due care when processing complaints from customers who say they were mis-sold PPI credit insurance.
A reporter from the Times newspaper who went undercover at one of Lloyds' complaints handling centres, Royal Mint Court in London, says he was nudged to ignore possible fraud by Lloyds salesmen and also steered that most complainants would give up if rejected first time.
08:52 UK time, Monday, 10 June 2013
The fog covering the future shape, size, ownership and culture of British banks should lift a bit in the next nine days, as first the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards issues its final report and then we have the chancellor's annual report to the City in his Mansion House speech.
Actually it's not 100% that the views of the commission will have been crystallised and published by then.
10:39 UK time, Friday, 7 June 2013
What is more troubling - governments that apparently disregard the privacy of our phone calls and online activity in the interests of national security, or governments that seem to put a higher priority on hi-tech inward investment than on protecting national security?
In the past 24 hours, we have had alleged examples of both.
10:57 UK time, Thursday, 6 June 2013
This government appointed a series of business people to sit as non-executives on the boards of Whitehall departments.
The so-called "lead" non-executive, the primus inter pares, is the former chief executive of BP, Lord Browne.
08:40 UK time, Wednesday, 5 June 2013
Has Tesco lost its mojo? Its results for the first quarter of the year are not strong, and yet the first few lines of its press release try to imply that they are, which is not the sign of a confident business.
For example, Tesco starts its press release by saying that "customer perceptions" have improved "on all key measures" - which may well be so, but is not the same thing as money in the till.
09:05 UK time, Tuesday, 4 June 2013
A draft report from the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards calls for the split of Royal Bank of Scotland into a good bank and a bad bank, I have learned.
The MPs and Lords on the Commission have till next Monday to read the report and formulate their views.
14:49 UK time, Monday, 3 June 2013
The Bank of England provided £16.5bn of cheap loans to the banks between the launch of its Funding for Lending Scheme last August and the end of March this year.
So what happened to the provision of credit by banks to UK households and businesses during those eight months?
07:53 UK time, Thursday, 23 May 2013
The Bank of England made history over the autumn and earlier this year.
Its newly created Financial Policy Committee announced that the big UK banks were short of capital to protect themselves against potential future losses and then quantified that gap as £25bn that needed to be raised by the end of this year.
09:20 UK time, Wednesday, 22 May 2013
Lloyds has said that following discussions with the banking regulator, the Prudential Regulation Authority, it does not need to sell new shares to boost its capital resources and enhance its ability to absorb future losses.
Later today, Royal Bank of Scotland is expected to say something broadly similar.
08:55 UK time, Tuesday, 21 May 2013
Crikey.
That was the word that ricocheted around my skull as I read the US congressional report into Apple Inc's tax arrangements.
00:06 UK time, Monday, 20 May 2013
Scotland, and Edinburgh in particular, has a world class financial services industry, in banking, insurance and fund management.
The question posed by today's Scotland Analysis Paper from the Treasury is whether a Scotland that separated from the rest of the UK would be able to retain the bigger banks that are part of that industry.
05:07 UK time, Thursday, 16 May 2013
BP's financial recovery from the disaster of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 is being put in jeopardy by the escalating amounts being paid to businesses in the Gulf of Mexico region to compensate them for economic harm.
The UK oil giant complains that the interpretation of rules for assessing "business economic loss" are being systematically abused such that colossal sums are being handed to enterprises that suffered no detriment from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Robert has won numerous awards for his journalism, including Journalist of the Year, Specialist Journalist of the Year and Scoop of the Year (twice) from the Royal Television Society, Performer of the Year from the Broadcasting Press Guild, and Broadcaster of the Year and Journalist of the Year from the Wincott Foundation.
Prior to joining the BBC, he was political editor and financial editor of the Financial Times, City Editor of the Sunday Telegraph and a columnist for the New Statesman and Sunday Times.
He broadcast and published a series of influential reports about the causes and consequences of the global financial crisis.
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