Coppola Comment

In June this year, a company called intu (no capitalisation) collapsed. Most people had never heard of it. But they knew what it did. It was the owner of many of the UK's biggest shopping centres. Lakeside in Thurrock, Metro Centre in Newcastle, and the Trafford Centre in Manchester - all of these were owned by intu. Indeed, they still are. At the time of writing, no disposals have been made.  So intu is the landlord of a significant part of the UK's retail sector. And it is dead, killed by the pandemic.  But like many of those killed by the pandemic, intu had underlying health issues that made it especially vulnerable.  Long before the pandemic struck, the retail sector was in trouble. Over the last few years, a  stream of household names have gone to the wall: Woolworths, Toys R Us, Mothercare, Maplin, BHS, Comet, and numerous fashion retailers. The department store House of Fraser was bought by Mike Ashley, owner of the lean and hungry Sports Direct. Numerous other retailers

At the ICAEW's conference "Do Banks Work?" last week, there was a fascinating interchange between Ian Gorham of Hargreaves Lansdowne and RBS's Ross McEwan. Apparently RBS had refused a large deposit from Hargreaves Lansdowne, to the irritation of the asset manager. "There is a problem placing client money", said Gorham. And he went on: "Banks don't need people's savings, because they now have much more capital to support lending. This means that savers receive much lower interest rates on deposits. For an ageing society, this is a problem".  This is a variant on the "banks don't need savings because they are awash with cash due to QE" meme. It does at least have the merit of understanding the structure of a balance sheet - for the same assets, if you have more equity you need less debt. But the WHOLE POINT of all the regulatory reforms of the last seven years was to force banks to deleverage - permanently. The inevitabl

The Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards has released its report into the fall of HBOS. And it is damning. It paints a picture of HBOS as probably the worst-run bank in the UK - a poster child for how not to run a bank. Management incompetence and self-delusion, a highly aggressive and ill-thought-out expansion strategy, totally inadequate risk management and a culture that rewarded excessive risk-taking and silenced those who sought to raise concerns. It could hardly be worse. More importantly, the findings for the first time brought to light the fundamental misunderstandings of the problems in banking that have persisted, and even been encouraged, since the financial crisis. I have felt like a lonely voice pointing out that HBOS, Northern Rock and the other UK banks that failed, with the sole exception of RBS, were RETAIL banks, and that neither ring fencing nor reform of investment banking was going to deal with the problems. But it seems that in the case of HBOS, the C

At the recent Occupy debate on "Socially Useful Banking", Andy Haldane argued strongly for culture change in banking, and particularly in retail banking - the sort of banking that ordinary people rely on for their payments, their short-term savings and their loans. And he claimed that structural separation of retail banking from what are viewed as "higher-risk" activities such as investment banking and trading would end cross-contamination of culture and enable retail banking to return to its roots in relationship management and judgement based on local knowledge. He said that the ring-fencing of retail banking as proposed in the Vickers report on reform of banking may not be enough and full separation would be considered if necessary. The roots of his remarks lie in the prevalent belief that the changes in retail banking in the 1980s/90s were a consequence of the liberalisation of investment banking in the so-called " Big Bang " of 1986. He comments th