This used to be the headquarters of Greensill Bank until it went bust earlier this year. The bank’s offices and the homes of its former bosses have been raided by police. Billions of savers’ cash looks to be lost. ibid.
The bank was part of a British-based investment company – Greensill Capital. ibid.
There had already been allegations in the press about some of Greensill’s investment schemes … With David Cameron on board, Greensill Capital attracted billions from investors. Their money was supposed to be safe. ibid.
Greensill made loans to businesses that were waiting to be paid for goods and services they had supplied to customers. But it didn’t use its own cash; the money for the loans was raised from investors, and Lex Greensill brought in a famous friend to drum up business. ibid.
The invoices simply didn’t exist. ibid.
Thousands of people put their savings in the hands of a company who offered them a comfortable retirement. Every year a billion pounds is lost in failed investment schemes. Panorama: The Billion-Pound Savings Scandal, BBC 2022
‘The way that Blackmore got a lot of investors in was offering very attractive returns: they are offering up 10% a year in investment payments.’ ibid. investigator
Took £5.5 million in investment fees from the investment pot. ibid.
There’s been a series of scandals in which the financial conduct authority was criticised for failing to protect investors. Steel workers lost thousands of pounds when they were persuaded by financial advisers to transfer out of their secure pension. While 300,000 investors lost around £1 billion in the Woodford scandal. The FCA was again criticised. And it doesn’t stop there. ibid.
New investments by overseas businesses into the US, which for decades held the No.1 spot, fell 49% in 2020, according to UN figures released Sunday, as the country struggled to curb the spread of the new coronavirus and economic output slumped. Wsj online article February 2021
A margin call occurs when the value of an investor’s margin account falls below the broker’s required amount. An investor’s margin account contains securities bought with borrowed money (typically a combination of the investor's own money and money borrowed from the investor’s broker). A margin call refers specifically to a broker’s demand that an investor deposit additional money or securities into the account so that it is brought up to the minimum value, known as the maintenance margin.
A margin call is usually an indicator that one or more of the securities held in the margin account has decreased in value. When a margin call occurs, the investor must choose to either deposit more money in the account or sell some of the assets held in their account. Investopedia online article Justin Keupper, update January 2021
Have negative interest rates in the UK really moved closer? The Bank of England’s instruction to commercial banks to prepare for a negative cost of borrowing is not all it seems … The headline from the Bank of England’s latest report released on Thursday is that ‘negative interest rates have come a step closer for the UK economy’.
Commercial banks have been instructed to ‘commence preparations’ for the official cost of borrowing to go into reverse – and to be in a position to process negative rates, set by the UK’s central bank, in their own internal computer systems.
From that perspective this is a significant day in UK monetary policy history and for a country which has never seen a negative cost of borrowing imposed since the Bank of England was founded in 1694. Independent online article Ben Chu February 2021
Something happened this January that no-one expected. It’s united capitalists, socialists and U-tubers. The idea that an internet forum could take a failing company and by collectively investing in it, or to use the parlance – Taking it to the Moon – take on hedge funds and win seemed impossible. But was this really a people’s revolution? Our World: GameStop: To the Moon and Back, BBC 2021
A year ago GameStop was to many a business slowly dying. It sells physical games at an actual shop, and many on Wall Street thought that that business wasn’t just outdated, it was prehistoric, a business doomed to fail. ibid.
This is the story of how an ordinary bunch of people connected by social media worked together to push up the stock price of a struggling video game retailer. Gamestop: The Wall Street Hijack, DiscoveryPlus 2021
WallStreetBets brings together a global community of amateur investors known as Retail Traders. ibid.
Hedge Funds are betting on GameStop’ shares to go down, not up, and they’re doing it using a technique called Short Selling. ibid.
The Reddit community is aching for a fight with the big shots of Wall Street, and it’s getting personal. ibid.
Gamestop’s shares start climbing, and I mean climbing fast. ibid.
By late January the Hedge Funds start to fail … Overall, short-sellers betting against GameStop go on to lose nearly $20 billion. ibid.
The Concorde fallacy: When one makes a hopeless investment: I can’t stop now. Daniel C Dennett, Good Reasons for Believing in God, AAI 2007