Showing Tag: ""banking crisis"" (Show all posts)

Bankers: too clever for their own good?

Posted by Paul Samael on Friday, December 7, 2012, In : Writing fiction

My thanks (once again) to Bernard Fancher for his recent review of my short story "The Hardest Word", which is about kidnapping a banker. It's always interesting to get people's reactions and in this case it made me wonder if I had got the story a bit wrong by managing to generate a degree of sympathy for my banker character - despite not having set out to make him particularly sympathetic. On the other hand, I plead guilty to having deliberately set out to endow him with certain admirable ...
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Endgame

Posted by Paul Samael on Monday, April 16, 2012, In : Book reviews

Just finished “Endgame” by Matthew Glass, a highly intelligent political thriller which – despite its somewhat dry-sounding subject matter – had me completely hooked. It’s about how a run on a bank could morph from a major financial problem into something akin to the Cuban missile crisis (but with the Chinese taking the place of the Russians). It’s worth reading purely for how convincingly this very frightening scenario is laid out.

Other recent books have tried to make connec...

Bankers, again

Posted by Paul Samael on Friday, February 24, 2012, In : Random thoughts

I’m probably starting to sound like a stuck record on this topic (it all started with this post - which led to this one and then, like a man with really appalling athlete's foot, I just couldn't stop myself scratching this particular itch and had to do another). But I keep hearing people attempting to defend the indefensible when it comes to the kind of remuneration practices which helped to cause the banking crisis.

Earlier this week, for example, we had John Cridland from the CBI on ...
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Token gestures

Posted by Paul Samael on Tuesday, January 31, 2012, In : Random thoughts

Lots of controversy about bankers here in the UK this week, with the CEO of the nationalised Royal Bank of Scotland eventually (but rather grudgingly) waiving his bonus of just under £1 million (only after a threat of a Parliamentary vote against it) and former CEO Fred "the Shred" Goodwin being stripped of his knighthood (so no need for me to put a "Sir" in front of his name there). But these are just token gestures really - very little is being done to get banks to rein in these ridiculou...
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Bringing bankers to book

Posted by Paul Samael on Tuesday, December 13, 2011, In : Random thoughts

The UK Financial Services Authority has just published its report into what went wrong at Royal Bank of Scotland (and what went wrong at the FSA too). I was interested to see that in the foreword to the report - which is quite a short read - FSA Chairman Adair Turner argues that we need to look at ways of ensuring that in future bankers can be brought to book for this kind of economic disaster (because as he acknowledges, hardly any of them have been held to account this time around). The ...
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The Hardest Word

Posted by Paul Samael on Friday, November 25, 2011, In : Writing fiction

Just published a short story, “The Hardest Word” on smashwords.com. Very impressed with how straightforward the whole process was – you just need to be prepared to put in some time formatting the book correctly in MS Word (the smashwords guidelines explain what you need to do and are extremely clear). This was a dry run for making my novel available as an ebook, also via smashwords (the key advantage being that it makes the book available in almost all major ebook formats). If you...
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Paul Samael

Welcome to my blog, "Publishing Waste" which will either (a) chronicle my heroic efforts to self-publish my own fiction; or (b) demonstrate beyond a scintilla of doubt the utter futility of (a). And along the way, I will also be doing some reviews of other people's books and occasionally blogging about other stuff.

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