Today’s post is a guest post by Jan Weir, a Barrister from Canada who specialises in Banking and Fraud and who also teaches Business Law at the University of Toronto. On many occasions here in Financial Regulation Matters , and in fact in society in general, we discuss elements of society that have been directly affected by the Financial Crisis, but only mention the Crisis in passing. Whilst this is not done to reduce the understanding that the Crisis devastated society, the passing time has allowed for the actual causes of the Crisis to become so engrained that they are rarely discussed anymore. So, in this guest post, Jan Weir helpfully provides a reflective account to discuss some of the underlying causes to the Crisis so that we can bring them back to the forefront of our thinking when assessing current events – the underlying sentiments and motivations have not changed. Trying to Help the Poor Caused the Financial Crisis As absurd as that sounds when put in a simple sen...

In today’s post we will assess a few pieces of news that are pertinent to a number of recent posts here in Financial Regulation Matters , with the focus being on the potential case looming over RBS against 9,000 shareholders and investors, a public rebuke for the Lloyds’ Compensation Scheme that is still to be concluded, and finally the news that a major case of potential fraud has been dismissed by a leading regulator, which comes at an unfortunate time with the Government publicly denouncing another regulator/agency that is concerned with punishing instances of fraud (the Serious Fraud Office). Fred Goodwin and RBS Appear to Have Dodged a Bullet At the end of last month we discussed the case concerning RBS and its £12 billion cash-call in 2008 which, subsequently, resulted in a large number of shareholders and investors losing substantial amounts of money. The investors have been claiming that the Bank purposely obscured details of the health of the bank before issuing t...