This from The Global Financial Crisis from the Central Bank of Chile. The disparity that stands out is between Europe and US/ UK. The alignment of Japan/ Germany/ France is interesting and surprising. Source: BANCO CENTRAL DE CHILE Technorati Tags: jobs,dividends,US housing,UK,Germany,France,Japan,Chile Continue reading Jobs or Dividends – an interesting country comparison
This is interesting. Everyone assumes Blackberry is the gold standard for government and corporate communications. It is hard to imagine why an iphone using 128 or 256 bit encryption would be any less secure. I would think the main thing would be to restrict access from other apps to your emails, although that risk is identical in the blackberry when 3rd party apps are added so that risk is not permissible as an excuse 😉 Oh, and banks are now using iphone for online banking. This is simply another paradigm shift that people are finally getting over. Apple’s iPhone replaces … Continue reading Apple’s iPhone finally replaces BlackBerry for some bankers | Reuters
Carol at Glenbrook earlier made the classic point that Memo to Bankers: A Customer is Someone Who Pays You in the context of the Durbin Amendment that is designed amongst other things to make interchange fees visible to consumers. Interchange fees are those little understood fees which banks and card companies charge each other and merchants every time you use a credit/debit card. Interchange is very convoluted but the bottom line is that it is a relative gravy train for banks. The update is that Visa claim that making interchange fees visible to consumers are somehow a bid by merchants … Continue reading Visa is not happy about the prospect of its fees becoming visible
2010 is on a pace at least as large as 2009. Technorati Tags: bank closures,FDIC Continue reading Banks closed by FDIC hits 73 this week
One outcome of the new Lib/Con coalition is that the FSA will survive. The suggestion is that systemic banking risk will be a specific responsibility of the Bank of England but that individual bank monitoring will remain with the FSA. This will be welcome news to UK banks who remain concerned about relative competition with foreign jurisdiction banks. Osborne aide says FSA might survive | ft.com George Osborne, the new Tory chancellor, has been forced to water down plans to hand over banking supervision to the Bank of England under a five-year coalition deal struck with the Liberal Democrats. Tory … Continue reading Financial Services Authority will survive under new coalition government
It was fascinating to follow the finale of the UK election today. David Cameron is the new PM and Gordon Brown is already back in Kircaldy. It was also a testament to internet that I could follow the entire thing online. What struck me was the elegance, crispness and classiness of the transition notwithstanding the underlying political rivalries and personal desires to win and one cannot help but compare to the neverending American way. The British have been managing transitions between governments for 100’s of years. Indeed this Queen alone, has overseen every government transition since Churchill left in 1955. … Continue reading Out with the old and in with the new – a historic day in Britain
Increasingly it appears the financial world toppled on the edge of global crisis last Wednesday on a scale that has not been seen since September 2008 when Lehman Brothers went down. European banks in bonds plea to ECB | ft.com Worried bankers from 47 European groups urged the ECB to become a “buyer of last resort” of eurozone government bonds to steady markets. There was speculation that the central bank could be preparing a €600bn ($762bn) loan facility for one-year loans at 1 per cent to help more than 1,000 banks in their funding. What was most interesting this week … Continue reading What happened in the markets this week is quite rational
I cannot but help believe there is a deeper problem relative to the situation in Greece. Three people died in a central Athens bank that was set ablaze by Greek protesters on Wednesday during a march against government austerity measures, aimed at saving the country from bankruptcy At one level it is a financial crisis and it should get sorted out with banks involved taking losses eventually as debt will have to be written off or at least placed on such terms as to make repayment unlikely. But this situation is altogether different and deeper than Argentinean or Thai defaults … Continue reading Greece and what it means
A little known event occurs Wednesday. The 13 root nameservers that run the internet by ensuring those obscure numeric IP addresses resolve as friendly english words for us, are getting a security upgrade. DNSSEC is designed to solve a flaw in regular DNS used by the root servers to date. When you type in your url, a check is run through DNS servers to obtain the numeric IP address which then locates the site you are seeking. As clunky as it sounds this happens very quickly in milliseconds. It does this by caching the dns information held at the root … Continue reading DNSSEC 5th May 2010 at 17:00 UTC | is this another Y2K?
This is a fabulous post. It is fabulous because it shows the folly associated with every banks walled garden approach to security. The message here is that you (bank) must assume your personnel network is compromised. Hacking Your Bank | SNOSOFT RESEARCH TEAM Because this engagement required stealth, we focused on the social attack vectors and Social Reconnaissance. We first targeted FaceBook with our “FaceBook from the hackers perspective“ methodology. That enabled us to map relationships between employees, vendors, friends, family etc. It also enabled us to identify key people in Accounts Receivable / Accounts Payable (“AR/AP”). After investigating a … Continue reading Hacking your Bank | Snosoft
