Asset International

Balance Sheets Never Lie

Paula — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:56:27 GMT

This financial ecosystem has evolved a long way away from “real” economic activities such as growing food, extracting minerals, processing raw materials in factories and transporting finished goods by land and sea.

Welcome to Catatonia

Paula — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 06:05:59 GMT

Custodian banks are now in the fourth year of a prolonged crisis.

A Want of Honor

Paula — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 09:13:35 GMT

Politics is a notoriously ignoble profession. But in any gainful pursuit the temptation to behave dishonorably is as common as the opportunity to do the right thing. In financial markets, where the sums are large, leverage multiplies returns and insiders

From Global Custodian: In Praise of Social Bandits

Paula — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:42:19 GMT

From Global Custodian's Editor-in-Chief Dominic Hobson: Marco Sciarra was a Neapolitan bandit of the late 16th Century. He described himself as an “envoy of God against usurers and the possessors of unproductive wealth.” Short sellers make improbable folk heroes, scourges of big business and the banking

From Global Custodian: Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

Paula — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:41:53 GMT

From Global Custodian's Editor-in-Chief Dominic Hobson: That human beings deceive themselves in order to deceive others better is now a staple of evolutionary psychology, but the study of deception among animals has only stamped with the imprimatur of science what was obvious to Robert Burns as long ago as 1786.

Moneychanging without mystery

Application — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 07:50:00 GMT

Submitted by Dominic Hobson on Fri, 10 15 2010 10 06. Bankers are in an understandably cynical mood. Their industry is being traduced by the politicians who are most to blame for the financial crisis of 2007 08,

Democracy devours itself

Application — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 08:12:00 GMT

Submitted by Dominic Hobson on Wed, 08 25 2010 09 47. published in Global Custodian Summer 2010 issue Democracy is the great talisman of this most meretricious of political eras. Presidents, pundits and philosophers hold it in