Today’s post acts as a small review of two specific news pieces that broke today concerning two financial regulators in the U.K. Whilst one would have had to have been quick to spot these stories, with both falling down the list of financial news stories rather quickly, each has particularly strong knock-on effects, but for differing reasons. So, in this post, a little more detail will be added as both of those stories represent the latest iterations of themes that have formed the basis of a number of posts here in Financial Regulation Matters . The first story is concerned with the infamous report conducted by the FCA regarding the actions of RBS and its ‘Global Restructuring Group’ (GRG). We have covered this issue on a number of occasions, and heard most recently that whilst the FCA has been busy investigating and punishing a number of firms of their failures, firms like BrightHouse and Equifax, their hesitancy to take any serious action against RBS has garnered plenty of jus...

Today’s post acts as a sequel to a previous post here in Financial Regulation Matters that was concerned with ‘Public Finance Initiatives’, or PFIs for short. In that first post, the PFIs were established as a good idea captured by private greed, ultimately posing a great threat to society at a time where greed can have generational consequences over and above that caused by the Financial Crisis. The focus of the post was on the cross-party support for these initiatives, with their output being vastly overvalued and the tab being taken on the by the citizens of the U.K. However, in this post, we will look at the PFI issue from within the confines of tax, or more precisely the lack of it, that is derived from these initiatives. However, there is something important that needs to be declared before the post continues, and that is that this post does not aim to fall in line with a certain political party’s denouncement of all things private i.e. the current incarnation of the Labour ...