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The banking reform Bill will be a missed opportunity if it does not support community banking

The second reading of the Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill is today. This is the main debate on the principle of the Bill. It was previously provisionally scheduled for last Monday. I have found myself assigned to statutory instrument committees on both occasions, potentially preventing me from speaking in the debate. I was notified of today’s duty late on Friday, too late to find a substitute. Of course I am disappointed this means I probably won’t be able to make [...]

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Tonight: Bank of Dave is back

Dave Fishwick is a remarkable man. A self-made entrepreneur, he knows good business builds up society. So when he realised the banks were failing both savers and productive businesses, he set up Burnley Savings and Loans as a step towards a “tiny, tiny bank”. Dave personally guarantees customers’ savings out of his own assets. He provides a 5% return. He makes productive loans to local businesses he gets to know personally. But the Establishment doesn’t know how, perhaps whether, to [...]

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Interest rate swap meeting

Yesterday, I attended the latest meeting of the All Party Group on Interest Rate Swap Mis-selling, which affects a number of local businesses. Both the products and the process of clearing up after them are causing a great deal of distress and difficulty. As well as giving direct support to constituents on this issue, I made an intervention in the recent debate called by the Group’s chairmen, my colleague Guto Bebb. You can read the full debate here.  I said: [...]

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Our ballooning national debt – is City AM the only paper worth reading?

This morning in City A.M., Editor Allister Heath writes once again about the lamentable failure of the political and media class properly to inform the public debate on our country’s finances. Referring to a poll asking whether the Coalition is cutting the national debt, keeping it the same or increasing it: These same questions were first asked at the beginning of the year by ComRes, last time on behalf of the Centre for Policy Studies. Depressingly, the public’s economic literacy [...]

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The Government should now adopt my bill on bank accounting

Accounting seems so dreary but what if broken rules allow banks to show false profits, overstate capital and hide losses? What if the banks have paid bonuses out of unrealised gains? The Bill I introduced in March 2011 deals with just those problems. All the details are here. I learnt today that the Bank of England will make a statement on Thursday about bank balance sheets. I expect they will require assets to be written down and more capital to [...]

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Bank on Dave – in Parliament tomorrow

Tomorrow in Parliament, I’m hosting a meeting with Dave Fishwick and MPs to discuss his struggle to start a local, responsible bank in touch with its savers and borrowers. The Channel 4 documentary is here and this Russia Today video gives an overview: The FSA have declined to attend but I’m hoping that MPs hearing from Dave will redouble efforts to persuade the Government to lower barriers to entry in banking. If you would like to ask your MP to [...]

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Leverage and the Bank of England

In his speech yesterday, potential Governor of the Bank of England Paul Tucker discussed moral hazard, agency problems, short-termism and the “manifestly false” assumptions of risk models. I almost feel prophetic. He also said: When credit markets become overly exuberant, not only do the balance sheets of lenders become stretched, cheap credit leads borrowers to become over indebted, raising the probability of default. When defaults eventually pick up, a general awakening occurs, triggering mass deleveraging. So close to the monetary [...]

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Bank’s risk management affected by IFRS accounting

Since I introduced a measure criticising IFRS accounting and requiring banks to prepare accounts to UK standards, there have been a stream of developments backing up my criticisms. The problem extends as far as Korea. Via bruegel.org: Korean firms’ business activities, such as risk management and foreign investment, have been affected by the obligation since 2011 to adopt International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). Korean banks may need to reshape their credit-rating models and enhance their loan-collection systems to prepare for [...]

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The awful unspoken truth about QE

Via Conservative Home’s blog The Deep End, an interesting question about QE: If the Government is just going to print money, why can’t we have some? Of course, if you started to give the cash directly to the people, then they might finally understand that our entire economic system runs on funny money. And who knows what would happen then? Henry Ford is supposed to have answered their question: It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand [...]

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David Fishwick, the Bank of Dave and the causes of the economic crisis

I first met David Fishwick on 15 March this year. He was interviewing a series of MPs for his Channel 4 documentary Bank of Dave: David Fishwick is so fed up with the way that the banks are treating people he’s decided to open his own tiny bank to serve his local community in Burnley and help the people the banks have turned down. Dave’s plan is to open an old fashioned bank and be a hands-on bank manager giving [...]

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Steve Baker is MP for Wycombe. He was previously an RAF officer then a business software consultant. Find out more...

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