US President Barack Obama was scheduled to announce reforms on Wednesday aimed at averting any repeat of the banking crisis that is still driving up unemployment around the world nearly two years after it struck.
British Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling was also set to demand a change in banking management yesterday.
The US government has been discussing for six months how best to tighten bank and market regulation in response to the crisis, which was triggered by increasingly risky investment particularly in US home loans during a long-running credit boom.
Obama said on Tuesday that a single regulator would oversee big banks. The smaller banks will remain under the supervision of, among others, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, which insures bank and thrift deposits, he said.
“What we do have under our proposal is that for tier-one institutions, the big institutions, who if they fail — require us to shore them up — for those folks, they are going to be under a single regulatory body,” Obama said in an interview with financial news television network CNBC.
“There is going to be streamlining, consolidation ... so that you don’t find people falling through the gaps,” Obama told reporters on Tuesday. “Whether it’s on the consumer protection side, the investor protection side, the systemic risks ... It’s going to be a much more effectively integrated system than previously.”
A senior US official told reporters the plan would also close one bank regulator, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and put the Federal Reserve in charge of monitoring big-picture economic risks.
While belief that the worst is past has propelled global stocks around 40 percent up from their March nadir, investors have begun to seek firmer evidence that a real upturn is in sight.
“Overall, the risk of a continued sharp contraction in output in the near term had receded somewhat,” the Bank of England said, explaining why it voted this month to keep interest rates at a record low of 0.5 percent and maintain its efforts to pump money into the economy by buying debt.
However, “even if developments over the month had been positive, the increase in confidence apparent in some financial market indicators and some household and corporate sector surveys remained fragile,” the bank said in minutes published yesterday.
Meanwhile, Britian’s financial chief Darling told BBC radio that bank executives’ lack of judgment was to blame for the depth of the financial crisis.
He acknowledged that banking regulations needed to be improved, but put the onus firmly on bank boardrooms to avoid a repeat of the current crisis.
“I am going to make the point very forcibly that the first line of defense is in the bank boardrooms themselves,” Darling said ahead of his main annual speech to the financial sector. “It is quite obvious that if you look at what has happened over the last few years, as more and more products became more sophisticated, more complex, quite simply too many people just did not understand what was happening and they didn’t understand the risks to which they were becoming exposed.
The government is aiming to recruit 1,096 foreign English teachers and teaching assistants this year, the Ministry of Education said yesterday. The foreign teachers would work closely with elementary and junior-high instructors to create and teach courses, ministry official Tsai Yi-ching (蔡宜靜) said. Together, they would create an immersive language environment, helping to motivate students while enhancing the skills of local teachers, she said. The ministry has since 2021 been recruiting foreign teachers through the Taiwan Foreign English Teacher Program, which offers placement, salary, housing and other benefits to eligible foreign teachers. Two centers serving northern and southern Taiwan assist in recruiting and training
WIDE NET: Health officials said they are considering all possibilities, such as bongkrekic acid, while the city mayor said they have not ruled out the possibility of a malicious act of poisoning Two people who dined at a restaurant in Taipei’s Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 last week have died, while four are in intensive care, the Taipei Department of Health said yesterday. All of the outlets of Malaysian vegetarian restaurant franchise Polam Kopitiam have been ordered to close pending an investigation after 11 people became ill due to suspected food poisoning, city officials told a news conference in Taipei. The first fatality, a 39-year-old man who ate at the restaurant on Friday last week, died of kidney failure two days later at the city’s Mackay Memorial Hospital. A 66-year-old man who dined
EYE ON STRAIT: The US spending bill ‘doubles security cooperation funding for Taiwan,’ while also seeking to counter the influence of China US President Joe Biden on Saturday signed into law a US$1.2 trillion spending package that includes US$300 million in foreign military financing to Taiwan, as well as funding for Taipei-Washington cooperative projects. The US Congress early on Saturday overwhelmingly passed the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act 2024 to avoid a partial shutdown and fund the government through September for a fiscal year that began six months ago. Under the package, the Defense Appropriations Act would provide a US$27 billion increase from the previous fiscal year to fund “critical national defense efforts, including countering the PRC [People’s Republic of China],” according to a summary
‘CARRIER KILLERS’: The Tuo Chiang-class corvettes’ stealth capability means they have a radar cross-section as small as the size of a fishing boat, an analyst said President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday presided over a ceremony at Yilan County’s Suao Harbor (蘇澳港), where the navy took delivery of two indigenous Tuo Chiang-class corvettes. The corvettes, An Chiang (安江) and Wan Chiang (萬江), along with the introduction of the coast guard’s third and fourth 4,000-tonne cutters earlier this month, are a testament to Taiwan’s shipbuilding capability and signify the nation’s resolve to defend democracy and freedom, Tsai said. The vessels are also the last two of six Tuo Chiang-class corvettes ordered from Lungteh Shipbuilding Co (龍德造船) by the navy, Tsai said. The first Tuo Chiang-class vessel delivered was Ta Chiang (塔江)