Interesting summary of the SEC’s record. SEC: The record | ft.com 2001 Enron The collapse of Enron exposed serious flaws in US regulation as authorities failed to notice that the company was concealing massive losses by using illegal off-balance sheet financing vehicles 2002 Sarbanes Oxley Act Many critics see this as a regulatory overreaction. Much criticism directed at section 404 requiring companies to produce a time-consuming “internal control report”. Widely blamed for deterring foreign companies from doing business in the US 2006 Credit Rating Agency Reform Act This act created a scheme for agencies to be treated as nationally recognised … Continue reading SEC: The record

For the first time an absolute majority of Canadians use Online Banking – not just the usual percentage of those online. More importantly 35% identify online as their primary means of banking. For the first time, the majority of Canadians (53 per cent) are now banking online | Canadian Bankers Association # A majority of Canadians (53 per cent) report using online banking in the last year. # 35 per cent of Canadians today use the Internet as their main means of banking; more people now identify the Internet rather than ABMs (28 per cent) or in-person transaction (24 per … Continue reading For the first time, the majority of Canadians (53 per cent) are now banking online

This is something that bothers me about conferences – wifi. Recently Toronto Tech week was a city sponsored conference and there was no wifi. SwissCom Tries To Deflect Criticism Of Le Web Internet Failure Le Web, which paid €100,000 to Swisscom to ensure lightning fast Internet, had no Internet connectivity. Nothing for the audience, nothing for the stage, nothing in the press room. Ustream had 50% connectivity, and lost some great footage. Day 1 was a complete writeoff and I left mid day to work from my hotel. On day two there was some connectivity reported by a few people, … Continue reading wifi is a requirement for conferences

Just for the record – US Government T-Bills went negative yesterday for the first time since the war. This means purcahsors paid more than face value for bills. The demand for US dollars is extreme at the moment, and somewhat perverse considering the credit crisis began there. Interest rate on US T-bills turns negative | ft.com Nervous investors on Tuesday paid for the privilege of owning US government debt, pushing interest rates on three-month Treasury bills to negative levels for the first time in postwar history. The flight to safety helped the Treasury sell $30bn in four-week bills at a … Continue reading Interest rate on US T-bills turns negative

The Globe and Mail, while a business oriented newspaper takes a decidedly consumer approach to their headline, without covering both sides of the story – their headline is headline grabbing without pointing out one of the real dangers implicit in such low rates. Banks fail to match rate cut – again | Globe and Mail Canada’s banks, squeezed by tight credit conditions, only passed two-thirds of the central bank’s rate cut on to consumers, posing a challenge for Ottawa as the economy withers. We can debate the amount of bank profits and I won’t go there in this article. The … Continue reading The quandry for banks in times of very low interest rates