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 […]
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 (GFC) of […]
IREF headline
Published on 18 August 2022.
First published as an IREF online article on 3 August 2022.
The press releases following the meeting of the ECB Governing Council (GC) on Thursday 22 July 2022 are masterpieces of uninformation in which the ECB attempts to gaslight its stakeholders, making them question their own perception of reality. It is […]
Published on 17 August 2022.
Based on an article published in the Daily Express on 13 July 2022.
Red alerts are flashing all over the Whitehall radar screen. The Prime Minister has been deposed and the country is leaderless for the summer. Living standards are plummeting under the impact of soaring inflation. Russia’s savagery tortures Ukraine and […]
Published on 14 August 2022.
Earlier published on www.brexit-watch.org on 13 July 2022 under the above headline and photograph, a Photo of Anak Krakatau by arief adhari/EyeEm from Adobe Stock].
BREXIT HAS BEEN largely botched so far, as has so much else by the present government. Remainers, several now emanating from their mausolea, claim that prices […]
Published on 10 August 2022.
Published on www.brexit-watch.org on 30 June 2022.
Boris Johnson and Michael Gove stole our horse. They forced themselves into the leadership positions in the Leave campaign as a means to power for themselves. They decided the issues that the Leave campaign would fight on. In doing that – and mainly by conflating […]
Published on 7 August 2022
I was delighted to read the article (more like a dissertation) called ‘The Great Game Will Never End: Why the Global Financial Crisis Is Bound to Be Repeated’ which was published in the Journal of Risk and Financial Management and written by my good friend Professor David Blake of the Finance […]