Britain should move ahead quickly with reforming its banks to make them safer and ignore lobbying to delay the separation of their deposit-taking and investment operations, British Business Secretary Vince Cable said in a newspaper article on yesterday.
“Banks must be left under no illusion that reform is coming. The recession is not an excuse for postponing banking reform. Indeed our economic recovery depends on it,” he wrote in the Mail on Sunday.
A government-commissioned report is expected today to recommend banks split their retail banking operations from their riskier investment arms and hold more capital to protect taxpayers from any future financial crisis.
However, there are expectations banks could be given years to implement the reforms after recent financial market turmoil and a deepening eurozone debt crisis has raised fears over the impact of swifter change.
Britain’s four largest banks — Barclays, HSBC and part-nationalized lenders RBS and Lloyds — have warned that excessively tough regulation could harm the already weak UK economy, as well as hitting their own profits.
British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, of the Conservative party, will have the final say on the proposals from the Independent Commission on Banking.
Cable, from the coalition government’s smaller Liberal Democrat party, has pursued a hard line against banks after taxpayers paid billions of pounds to keep the sector afloat following the credit crisis.
Cable said bankers, not their customers, should bear the cost of the reforms by reducing their “lavish” salaries and payments to shareholders.
“We should be suspicious of any claims that separation will force them to lend less to businesses,” he said.
He criticized the banks for launching a “big lobbying operation” to forestall the separation of their operations.
He also said bankers had continued to award themselves “huge salaries and bonuses” while their institutions remained dependent on taxpayer guarantees.
The center-left Liberal Democrats are keen to show themselves as tougher on banks than their Conservative coalition partners, who have traditionally been seen as more sympathetic to the finance industry.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
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New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last