Financial crisis

During the cost-of-living crisis the employers’ organisation BusinessEurope has turned a blind eye to the link between industry's super profits and inflation. Their refrain is that wage moderation is the key to fight inflation. Their message: wage earners should pay for the crisis, not corporate profiteers.

The climate summit is set to address 'finance flows' to protect us from climate change. But the proposals are developed by the financial industry and full of loopholes. And not only that: big financiers of big polluters, such as BlackRock, Bank of America and Citigroup, will take charge of implementation.

After letting its Director leave to head finance lobby group AFME, the European Banking Authority chose to nominate a successor who used to be a lobbyist for the same group. That is just of one of the reasons for the European Parliament to reject Gerry Cross as head of the EBA.

The Director of the European Banking Authority is set to become the new Chief Executive of one of the most powerful finance lobby groups in Europe. The move has been approved by the Authority with a decision that flies in the face of common sense and triggers all sorts of alarm bells over conflicts of interest .

Any future EU-UK trade agreement post-Brexit will have to deal with the financial sector. And the financial lobby has been pushing its own model for long. Their risky plans on 'regulatory cooperation' are uncovered in this report from Corporate Europe Observatory, LobbyControl, Observatoire des Multinationales and SpinWatch.

Corporate Europe Observatory shows how the past ten years of financial lobbying have left us vulnerable to future crises and costly bailouts. Despite their responsibility for the 2008 crash, the financial sector has successfully avoided major reform in the decade since - and has shaped new legislation with big loopholes and conditions similar to those that created the crash in the first place.

CEO recently met with officials at DG Markt to discuss their use of expert advisors. Read our analysis of what DG Markt has done to change the balance of expert groups – and find out more about the problems that still remain.

Pathetic finale to a historical battle on financial regulation.

No proposed regulation is so weak that it cannot be weakened further. And Goldman Sachs knows the strongest argument by heart: what if other countries chose something even less ambitious?

The new ALTER-EU report 'A captive Commission - the role of the financial industry in shaping EU regulation' can be found at: http://www.alter-eu.org/en/system/files/publications/CaptiveCommission.pdf Brussels, November 5, 2009 - The vast majority of financial ‘experts’ advising the European Commission represent the banks and investors responsible for the global economic crisis, according to a new report published today by the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation (ALTER EU) [1].

Why we shouldn't trust the EU's financial "wise men"