Tag Archives: city am

LibLink: Vince Cable: It’s time to tackle the UK’s dangerous addiction to debt

By NewsHound | Sun 13th August 2017 - 12:00 pm

One of Vince Cable’s claim to fame is that he accurately predicted the 2007 financial crash. Ten years on, he recently wrote an article for City AM in which he said that our economy was again at risk because of high debt levels.

Debt, in itself, isn’t bad. He talks about his own experience:

Indeed, my own youthful borrowing included buying my late wife a grand piano on an overdraft, a decision that underpinned 33 years of happy marriage. (And I paid off the debt after a struggle.)

The issue with debt is one of limits and sustainability, for both the individual and the wider financial system. The same, clearly, applies to government debt and corporate and financial sector leverage.

What the 2008 financial crisis and its aftershocks have taught us is that those limits may be closer than we think – and, once crossed, can lead to rapid and painful corrections.

He looks at the current situation in which we are seeing high levels of personal debt again:

LibLink: Vince Cable: After years of hiding from the public, Fred Goodwin will face the music over RBS’ failure next month

By NewsHound | Sat 20th May 2017 - 11:58 am

Vince Cable wrote an interesting article in City Am last week about the imminent appearance (on polling day, of all days) of Fred Goodwin, the former head of RBS in a court case brought by 9000 retail investors.

Goodwin, alongside RBS itself and several other former executives at the bank, are defendants in a case brought against them by 9,000 retail investors, including many current RBS employees. The trial starts in less than two weeks (22 May) and Goodwin will be called to the stand after the opening remarks. The claimants allege they were wilfully misled over the true financial woes of RBS during the £12bn rights issue of 2008, which was supposed to stabilise the bank. Within months, RBS had to be rescued by the government, which spent £45.5bn of taxpayer money to stop it from collapsing.

Vince notes that Goodwin’s defence is being publicly funded and he still enjoys a lucrative RBS pension:

Goodwin has spent the past seven years hiding from a public still furious that his dreadful calls – notably the 2007 purchase of Dutch bank ABN Amro – helped bring Britain’s economy to its knees. He left RBS in 2009 and was later stripped of his knighthood. But he has never been properly taken to task for his failures.

Posted in LibLink | Also tagged vince cable | 1 Comment

Ms Joan LB Edwards: the mystery donor who bequeathed £99,423 to the Lib Dems – our 20% share as “the party of government of the day”

By Stephen Tall | Tue 13th August 2013 - 12:40 pm

Chris Harlow and James Waterson at City A.M. has the bizarre story:

Eyebrows were raised this morning when it was revealed that the top individual donor to political parties in the second quarter of the year was one “Ms Joan L B Edwards” who gave the Conservatives £420,576 and the Lib Dems £99,423.

Ms Edwards has not shown any particular interest in politics in the past so onlookers immediately wondered whether she was spurred into action by the coalition’s success.

But City A.M. can reveal that it is actually the result of a bizarre bequest. Ms Edwards recently died and a mole

…

Posted in News | Also tagged chris harlow, donations (Lib Dem) and joan l.b. edwards | 17 Comments