Joris Luyendijk, Dutch anthropologist and journalist, is currently blogging an anthropological study of bankers he’s doing in the City of London for Guardian. From the introduction to the blog: It is quite a change for me, exploring bankers. I used to do anthropological fieldwork among students in the slums of Cairo, then worked as a… Read More »
From Reuters: Nigeria’s central bank plans to diversify its $33 billion in foreign exchange reserves away from the dollar by switching a tenth of the stockpile into yuan, underlining the momentum behind China’s drive to internationalise its currency. “We are looking at anything to start with from 5 to 10 percent of our reserves,” central… Read More »
If you have been following the news, you know about the shake-up, the rescue and the proposal to buy off bad loans. Reuter’s report on the current state of the industry: Two of Nigeria’s nine rescued banks are in talks with foreign investors about recapitalisation but most of the others are more likely to be… Read More »
Reuters: The bank expects economic expansion of 4.6 percent in 2011 and estimates the region grew by between 1.0 and 1.1 percent in 2009, said Andrew Burns, the bank’s manager of global macro economic trends.
The crash of 2008 revealed the flaw in the euro’s construction, as each member country had to rescue its own banking system instead of doing it jointly. The Greek debt crisis brought matters to a climax. If member countries cannot take the next steps forward, the euro may fall apart, with adverse consequences for the… Read More »
I was just thinking of writing a column on the new term limit imposed by the Central Bank of Nigeria on bank CEOs when I saw this thoughtful Next editorial: Is the CBN too powerful? In the national confusion over our president who has vanished into thin air, a significant but little remarked event occurred… Read More »
From FT reporter Tom Burgis: Two of Nigeria’s most prominent bank chief executives are to be forced to stand down under new rules introduced by the central bank as part of the governor’s ongoing tussle with some of the country’s most powerful tycoons. Lamido Sanusi, who took over as governor in June, has already rocked… Read More »
The Nigerian government has decided to implement a common year-end for Nigerian banks. The point is that, because banks have had different fiscal cycles they could move money around amongst each other to inflate the value of their total assets. Which was part of what contributed to the banking crisis of ’09. The immediate reaction:… Read More »
I am just about to finish reading anthropologist Karen Ho‘s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. She carried out seventeen months of fieldwork on Wall Street, interviewing and observing investment bankers. Actually, she started out as a rookie analyst working in management consulting in a hybrid investment and commercial bank. She had the intention of… Read More »
Financial Times’ Gillian Tett reviews Karen Ho’s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street: Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street By Karen Ho Duke Press £16.99, 392 pages When I first started covering finance for the FT, I used to get embarrassed when asked about my academic past. Before I became a journalist, I did a… Read More »