What do you want from our new financial watchdog?

The financial world needs tougher regulation and tougher enforcement, the FSA have been useless which I suppose is why it’s being replaced. Companies and individuals caught breaking the rules also need to be handed out proper sentences. I’d also like to see an end to bonus culture and executives awarding themselves massive increases every year.

‘Balls’

Any new “rules” or “procedures” in trying to curb banks is largely erroneous.

The Corporation of the City of London is in complete control of this and changes will only happen on their say so. Hedge fund investors made lots of money when the crisis started and we bemoaned the fact that directors were getting bonuses for their ineptitude, wrong!

Directors were given their bonuses because their companies were driven in the ground purposefully in order to make the top investors obscene amounts of money. They were towing the line of the City of London.

So for me, if you keep ignoring the elephant in the room, the undemocratic City of London, everything you do is pointless.

“So for me, if you keep ignoring the elephant in the room, the undemocratic City of London, everything you do is pointless.” I agree:

http://www.comparativetables.com/response.htm

I am hoping the publication of the RBS report will make a difference.

You can’t run Financial services & regulation with marketing tool of the call centre directed by biased accountants with no discretion . They maladministrate on corporate remits incapable of giving a fair hearing siding with people who fund them or the biggest bank account.While deregulated Government assumes this is howto be democratic . While cats away the mice will play….

The FCA is not a “stark contrast” to the FSA. It is more of the same, and should not be welcomed.
History is repeating itself: “powerful new regulator”, “consumer champion”, “early stage intervention” etc.

I would like to see regulators clamping down on banks making it difficult and unnecessarily frustrating to change accounts when the terms and conditions of the account are changed and a new product with better terms is made available. A phone call to the branch and answering a few security questions should be all that is necessary to change the old account to the new one.

I also would like to question Bob Diamond and wonder why he thinks he deserves ‘compensation’ for the job he does. I think the term should be salary or remuneration. I also would like to see the end of the culture of outrageous bonuses rewarding those who have caused havoc in the global financial world and real distress to so many in the real economy.

How about tackling ‘PROFITS’ from the beginning. i.e when manufacturers, retailers set them.
When I was growing-up and first started work comapnies and retailers set their profits by knowing what the cost of manufacturing and buying products would be and each adding 5-15% on for profit. Then along came Thatcher and her so called ‘free market’ economy, which was great for the already rich and the very greedy spiv types, not necessarily the same people. Prices were set to grab as much profit as possible (collaboration required between competing companies?), and forget the customer. Have greater ‘marketing-advertising’ ploys, inducements, using children as the pressure point, anything goes.

These days I am ashamed to admit that I am a Freeman of the City of London. When Chancellor Gordon Brown promised the City that he would keep the Regulators at bay in return for tax generation, he unleashed the pent up greed of a whole new generation of UK Bankers, who looked at what was going on elsewhere in the World, and jumped on the bandwagon. I was writing to Mervin King two years before it all went wrong, pleading with him to do something about 120% mortgages and sub-prime ‘instruments’ that no one in the Banks realy understood, and which were driven by bonuses paid on future profits. It had to go wrong. To give him his due, and much as I dislike the Lib Dems, Vince Cable was saying the same thing at that time. When will everyone learn that something that looks like a dog and barks like a dog, is almost always a dog.
The way out of recession now is to somehow harness long term savings as a means of funding Government debt. Not only will this bring our debts ‘in house’, it will generate taxes and put money back into the economy. The reasons given by the BOE for not doing this, is that it would disadvantage the Banks at a time when they are rebuilding their Balance Sheets. Do we care?