Thursday, September 16, 2010

For The Love of Money - 2 years went on

I recently saw a BBC channel with the title 'The Love of Money'. It was such an engaging documentary and a lot to learn from. The show slowly build up the time line from the 20's up to the recent global financial crisis. However, it was not on DVD yet, which I like to keep as this incident happen in my lifetime.

I searched the net and found an impact after the recession. You can click on the link to read the full article or read part of the column posted on the site here ...

Bankers won, politicians lost1

Posted on 24/09/09 by Alan Shipman2


One year on from their moment of meltdown, rescued institutions are again riding high, while the politicians who rescued them are paying the electoral price. The scale of the mess suggested, at the time, that banks had got onto their crash course through euphoria, miscalculation and madness. Now, the speed and low private cost with which they escaped that mess raises the equally scary likelihood that they were being rational all along.
The Great Escape

Aside from Lehman, banks have bounced back with their businesses and bonuses intact. Many have already returned to profit, with their investment banking units – whose speculative gambles were at the heart of last year’s problems – now helping to support the commercial side as it writes down its bad mortgage debt.

Lloyds, which looked to have bitten off more than it could chew by acquiring HBOS, is now a legally sanctioned giant that controls around one-third of UK mortgages and current accounts and a quarter of its business banking. Barclays, once viewed as perennially ripe for acquisition by a larger group, has now joined their ranks by cherry-picking Lehman at minimum cost. Fortis, facing bankruptcy a year ago, has announced a major UK expansion in alliance with Tesco. Merrill Lynch and Citibank continue to issue their uncompromising analysis of other firms’ finances, having buried the obituaries that were being written on their own a year ago.


Most of the management teams that presided over near-bankruptcy are still in place, enjoying undiminished performance and retention bonuses. Many of those dramatically turfed out of their Canary Wharf offices in September 2008 already have their feet under a comparable desk on someone else’s trading floor. And of the bosses who bet their banks and lost, there is none whose golden parachute failed to open. Even Lehman ex-CEO Dick Fuld is on hire as a consultant, just round the corner from Wall Street. Sir Fred Goodwin’s RBS pension, big enough to be a one-man stimulus package, attracts powerless resentment but continues to flow.

For more click http://www.open2.net/blogs/money/index.php/2009/09/24/bankers-won-politicians-lost?blog=5

No comments: