Davos 2010: Barclays’ Bob Diamond attacks Obama’s banking plans
Larry Elliot, The Guardian
Barclays’ president, Bob Diamond, warned today that Barack Obama’s plans to limit the size of banks would hit jobs, growth and global trade.
Speaking on the opening day of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Diamond said the growth in “large, integrated, universal banks” had been a response to market forces in the post-communist world.
“They [the big banks] fulfilled an important function in helping governments and corporates to transfer risk, particularly across borders,” Diamond added.
“Did banks get big because they wanted to or were they following their clients, their customers and the markets? Was it for an economic purpose?”…
(27 Jan 2010)
Maybe this says something about “market forces”? -KS
Davos Dialog Will Downplay Carbon, Talk Up Energy And Infrastructure
Trevor Curwin, cnbc.com
Organizers may have created a low-carbon, green zone for the occasion of the 40th annual global gabfest in the Swiss mountain two on Davos, but it may no longer be the best environment for high-profile chatter on climate change.
With little progress in talks at last December’s UN Copenhagen conference, and with economic growth still tepid, expect discussions of carbon emissions and climate change to take a back seat at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting this week.
“There was a lot of focus on climate change leading up to Copenhagen,” says Jon Sohn, climate change expert at law firm McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP. “It is not surprising they wouldn’t be the focus because we’re so fresh off of that.”
Carbon emissions and climate were headline items at last year’s Davos conference, but this year’s theme—”Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild”—promises to look at more ways to rework the world economy than simply making it low-carbon.
Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, NRDC, says while the low billing climate change is getting at Davos this year can partly be explained by conference’s organizers rotate their themes, other venues may now be more important to top-level discussions on climate change…
(26 Jan 2010)
King calls for ‘radical’ banking reform in UK
Mervin King, The Independent
The Governor of the Bank of England has called for a “radical” overhaul of the banking system in Britain, which could include a break-up of the banks, and praised President Barack Obama’s controversial plan to take on Wall Street.
Mervyn King told MPs yesterday that “we have to reform the financial system” and warned that if anything less than extreme measures were taken “we are doomed to make the same mistakes on a bigger scale”.
MPs on the influential Treasury Select Committee are looking at whether financial institutions should be too important to fail, and whether they should be split up. Mr King said while it was not up to the central bank to decide, he would “like to see a world in which there are more, probably smaller, banks which specialise in different activities”. He added: “It might well be that the right method of getting the firewalls is indeed to break them up, I don’t rule that out.”
The Financial Stability Board, the body set up by the G20 to identify problems in the global financial system, is investigating the risk of banks being too big to fail and will make recommendations to G20 leaders in October.
The board backed the plan tabled last week by President Obama to limit the size of the banks in the US and their trading activities…
(27 Jan 2010)
Bankers Return to Davos With a Bit Less Swagger
Jack Ewing, New York Times
Bankers are trickling back to Davos, but they will not be strutting quite the way they used to.
With an economic recovery under way, the financial elite will not be in hiding as they were last year, when only a comparative handful showed up in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual World Economic Forum. But they will still be on the defensive. The prospects for tighter regulation, which seemed to be fading a few months ago, look more likely than ever.
Amid popular outrage about soaring profits and bonuses, political leaders and economic policy makers seem intent on making progress toward some kind of rulebook that would prevent another bank-led crisis of the financial system.
“We cannot afford to have a financial system which is as fragile in the future as it has proved to be in the past,” the European Central Bank president, Jean-Claude Trichet, said this month…
(25 Jan 2010)
