Published on 21 November 2022
Sir Jon Cunliffe, Deputy Governor of Financial Stability, Bank of England, sees no contradiction between the rampant instability on Planet Cryptocurrency and the Bank’s plans to replace our cash with its own UK version of a cryptocurrency. This is the message today from the most senior person responsible for the stability […]
Published on 7 November 2022
UK payments have, over the last ten years, become increasingly digital and become the domain of a technocratic elite, working in tandem with Big Tech and the major payment card brands.
The UK’s ‘digital payments journey’ thus far has left an amount of damaging debris on the road behind it: Authorized Push […]
Blog published on 2 November 2022
First published as an IREF online article on irefeurope.org
‘Liability Driven Investment’ or ‘LDI’ is both a nonsense and a truism, and is now a byword for a disaster in the UK financial system.
Here is what happened. UK pension funds became convinced that they would experience a shortfall of resources to […]
Published on 13 October 2022
The payment industry’s migration to the ISO20022 XML data format promises much, or rather the list of promises is long and the same as it has been for a long time, and is very promising: richer data, easier data mining, easier compliance-checking and harmonization (aka everyone else is going to use […]
Published on 6 October 2022
On 6th October 2022 the PSR published its Final Decisions on its major and multi-year ‘work’ on the costs of accepting card payments for merchants. Costs, in this case, focuses on the service fees paid by a merchant to its appointed merchant acquirer. The all-in costs include the deductions-from-face-value, which the […]
Blog published on 18 August 2022 based on an article published on www.facts4eu.org on 12 August 2022
A major change in the financial management of the UK is needed. The current upsurge in inflation may have been triggered by energy prices, but the seedbed for it has been in the creation since the Global Financial Crisis […]
Original IREF article of 16 March 2022 accessed on 21 March 2022
Published on 23 March 2022
The EU recently announced partial financial sanctions on Russia, designed to keep payments for energy moving. The EU accepted the contention – disproved below – that a bank either gets cut off from SWIFT, the global financial telecommunications network, completely […]
Brexit-Watch article where this piece was originally published
Published on 7 March 2022
The UK’s financial sanctions over the Ukraine invasion fall well short of cutting Russia off SWIFT, maxing out on the usual self-congratulatory hyperbole whilst opening up significant risk. When we should be distinguishing our PR approach from that of the Kremlin, we instead get […]
What is SWIFT? Screenshot of its homepage
Published on 26 February 2022
As already published on Facts4EU and Brexit-Watch
It has been reported that Chancellor Scholz has rejected the proposal that Russia be cut off from the SWIFT system as a punishment for its invasion of Ukraine. The Guardian has disseminated misinformation that it would anyway do little […]
First published on brexit-watch.org
Published on 14 February 2022
Doubts have recently been raised about the financial competence of those who manage the national finances on behalf of all of us. The Chancellor Rishi Sunak has – belatedly some would say – come under fire for the losses to fraud through his Bounce Back Loans scheme: the […]