Peter Thal Larsen is a Dutch journalist. [1]
Thal Larsen graduated from Bristol University before going on to the London School of Economics. [1] He began working for the Financial Times in 1999 and moved to the paper's New York City office the following year, first as a financial correspondent and then U.S. communications editor. He returned to London in 2004 to become banking editor, leading the paper's coverage of the financial crisis and the 2008 United Kingdom bank rescue package. [2] In 2009, he departed to become Reuters' European comment editor, reporting to Jonathan Ford. [2] Following Reuters' acquisition of Breakingviews later that year he became assistant editor of Reuters Breakingviews. In 2012, he moved to Hong Kong to take up a new position within Reuters as the Asia editor for Breakingviews. [3]
Thal Larsen was one of a number of senior financial journalists who reported on the effects of the financial crisis on The Royal Bank of Scotland, and was interviewed by Ian Fraser for a 2011 BBC Two documentary on the topic. [4]
NatWest Group plc is a majority state-owned British banking and insurance holding company, based in Edinburgh, Scotland. The group operates a wide variety of banking brands offering personal and business banking, private banking, insurance and corporate finance. In the United Kingdom, its main subsidiary companies are National Westminster Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, Ulster Bank, NatWest Markets and Coutts. The group issues banknotes in Scotland and Northern Ireland; as of 2014, the Royal Bank of Scotland was the only bank in the UK to still print £1 notes.
HSBC Holdings plc is a British multinational investment bank and financial services holding company. It is the second largest bank in Europe behind BNP Paribas, with total equity of US$204.995 billion and assets of US$2.984 trillion as of December 2020. HSBC traces its origin to a hong in British Hong Kong, and its present form was established in London by the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation to act as a new group holding company in 1991; its name derives from that company's initials. The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation opened branches in Shanghai in 1865 and was first formally incorporated in 1866.
Anatole Kaletsky is an economist and journalist based in the United Kingdom. He has written since 1976 for The Economist, The Financial Times and The Times of London before joining Reuters and The International Herald Tribune in 2012. He has been named Newspaper Commentator of the Year in the BBC's What the Papers Say awards, and has twice received the British Press Award for Specialist Writer of the Year.
John McFarlane OBE is a British businessman. He served as Group Chairman of Barclays from 2015 to 2019.
Paul Myners, Baron Myners, CBE is a British businessman and politician. He was the Financial Services Secretary in HM Treasury, the UK's finance ministry, during the Labour Government of Gordon Brown. He held the position from October 2008 until May 2010, and was made a life peer in consequence of his appointment, as he was not an elected Member of Parliament. He also served on the Prime Minister's National Economic Council. He in the House of Lords as a Labour peer (2008–2014), then a non-affiliated peer, and now sits as a crossbencher.
A financial centre, financial center, or financial hub is a location with a concentration of participants in banking, asset management, insurance or financial markets with venues and supporting services for these activities to take place. Participants can include financial intermediaries, institutional investors, and issuers. Trading activity can take place on venues such as exchanges and involve clearing houses, although many transactions take place over-the-counter (OTC), that is directly between participants. Financial centres usually host companies that offer a wide range of financial services, for example relating to mergers and acquisitions, public offerings, or corporate actions; or which participate in other areas of finance, such as private equity and reinsurance. Ancillary financial services include rating agencies, as well as provision of related professional services, particularly legal advice and accounting services.
The Royal Bank of Scotland is a major retail and commercial bank in Scotland. It is one of the retail banking subsidiaries of NatWest Group, together with NatWest and Ulster Bank. The Royal Bank of Scotland has around 700 branches, mainly in Scotland, though there are branches in many larger towns and cities throughout England and Wales. The bank is completely separate from the fellow Edinburgh-based bank, the Bank of Scotland, which pre-dates the Royal Bank by 32 years. The Royal Bank of Scotland was established in 1724 to provide a bank with strong Hanoverian and Whig ties.
Breakingviews is Reuters' brand for financial commentary. The company was founded in 1999 as Breakingviews.com and was acquired by Thomson Reuters in 2009.
The shadow banking system is a term for the collection of non-bank financial intermediaries (NBFIs) that provide services similar to traditional commercial banks but outside normal banking regulations. Examples of NBFIs include insurance firms, pawn shops, cashier's check issuers, check cashing locations, payday lending, currency exchanges, and microloan organizations. The phrase "shadow banking" is regarded by some as pejorative, and the term "market-based finance" has been proposed as an alternative.
National Westminster Bank, commonly known as NatWest, is a major retail and commercial bank in the United Kingdom. It was established in 1968 by the merger of National Provincial Bank and Westminster Bank. In 2000, it became part of The Royal Bank of Scotland Group, which was re-named NatWest Group in 2020. Following ringfencing of the group's core domestic business, the bank became a direct subsidiary of NatWest Holdings; NatWest Markets comprises the non-ringfenced investment banking arm. The British state currently owns around 54.7% of NatWest Group plc after spending 45 billion pounds bailing out the lender in 2008.
The Great Recession was a period of marked general decline (recession) observed in national economies globally that occurred between 2007 and 2009. The scale and timing of the recession varied from country to country. At the time, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) concluded that it was the most severe economic and financial meltdown since the Great Depression. One result was a serious disruption of normal international relations.
HBOS plc was a banking and insurance company in the United Kingdom, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Lloyds Banking Group, having been taken over in January 2009. It was the holding company for Bank of Scotland plc, which operated the Bank of Scotland and Halifax brands in the UK, as well as HBOS Australia and HBOS Insurance & Investment Group Limited, the group's insurance division.
Santander UK plc is a British bank, wholly owned by the Spanish Santander Group. Santander UK plc manages its affairs autonomously, with its own local management team, responsible solely for its performance.
A bank tax, or a bank levy, is a tax on banks which was discussed in the context of the financial crisis of 2007–08. The bank tax is levied on the capital at risk of financial institutions, excluding federally insured deposits, with the aim of discouraging banks from taking unnecessary risks. The bank tax is levied on a limited number of sophisticated taxpayers and is not especially difficult to understand. It can be used as a counterbalance to the various ways in which banks are currently subsidized by the tax system, such as the ability to subtract bad loan reserves, delay tax on interest received abroad, and buy other banks and use their losses to offset future income. In other words, the bank tax is a small reimbursement of taxpayer funds used to bail out major banks after the 2008 financial crisis, and it is carefully structured to target only certain institutions that are considered "too big to fail."
Scot J. Paltrow is an American journalist. A financial journalist, Paltrow currently works for Reuters.
Barclays plc is a British multinational universal bank, headquartered in London, England. Barclays operates as two divisions, Barclays UK and Barclays International, supported by a service company, Barclays Execution Services.
The Libor scandal was a series of fraudulent actions connected to the Libor and also the resulting investigation and reaction. Libor is an average interest rate calculated through submissions of interest rates by major banks across the world. The scandal arose when it was discovered that banks were falsely inflating or deflating their rates so as to profit from trades, or to give the impression that they were more creditworthy than they were. Libor underpins approximately $350 trillion in derivatives. It is currently administered by Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), which took over running the Libor in January 2014.
John Marshall Nicholson is a Hong Kong investment banker.
Hugo Duncan Dixon is a British business journalist and the former editor-in-chief and chairman of the financial commentary website Breakingviews which he co-founded. He was the editor of the Financial Times Lex column from 1994 to 1999, and a visiting fellow at Saïd Business School, Oxford University.