banks

Regarding Cyprus, recently I heard someone claim that depositors are not creditors of a bank despite the fact that deposits are bank liabilities. This is bollocks. Depositors are indeed creditors, particularly in Europe where they are…

Today Cyprus voted to reject the deposit tax with 36 MPs voting against and 19 abstaining. One MP was absent. No one voted for the deposit tax. And so this trial balloon of bailing in insured depositors has crashed and burned spectacularly.…

It has been non-stop Cyprus for the past couple of days this weekend. And it has brought back the bad ol' days when every weekend seemed to be another episode in endless crisis. To wit, this episode in Cyprus demonstrates how misplaced the…

This is a thought experiment. I have written in favour of private sector involvement in the past. And I don't think this is a controversial topic. Where I do have problems with the Cypriot bank saver's tax is in terms of property rights and…

The latest news out of Cyprus is that the Cyrpiot government has delayed the vote on a bank bailout and savers tax by one day to Monday and that it has also extended the bank holiday from just Monday to Tuesday as well. In my view, the news…

This morning we learned that after hours of tense negotiation, Europe has hammered out a 10bn euro "bailout" of Cyprus. I put the term bailout in quotes because the key feature of this deal is the bail-in of Cypriot depositors to the tune…

Moody's released the following statement in conjunction with a ratings action it took earlier today on three Dutch banks

I listed Ireland in two of my surprises for 2013. I wrote that Ireland’s government bonds do not outperform again. Greece outperforms this year. I also wrote that Ireland goes to OMT. The first prediction is probably more controversial…

In the first paragraph of my book A Demon of Our Own Design (Wiley, 2007) I observe that “You don't deliberately obliterate hundreds of billions of dollars of investor money. And that is at the heart of this book – it is going to happen…

A recent study confirmed that control fraud was endemic among our most elite financial institutions.