It's that time again: FCA is incompetent
Discussion
Every few years a group of MPs and Lords all get together and work out again from scratch what everyone else already knows and has been screaming about for decades, which is that the FCA is utterly negligent.
'The report concluded the FCA was "incompetent at best, dishonest at worst", that its actions were "slow and inadequate" and that its leaders were "opaque and unaccountable".
It said the FCA had failed to properly investigate and act on information provided by whistleblowers and it said a transformation programme undertaken by the regulator had "not worked".
The report was carried out by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Investment Fraud and Fairer Financial Services, made up of 30 MPs and 14 members of the House of Lords.
Current and former FCA staff said the regulator had a “defective culture” in which “errors and inaction" were "too common”.'
https://www.ft.com/content/bb421a36-d344-46d5-badf...
https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2024/nov/26/f...
Under Andrew 'wake me up for my free lunch or if the FBI call' Bailey it did reach an all time low of doing absolutely nothing unless asked to by the European regulator, the FBI or the Prime Minister. Along with its policy of zero policing and clean up only but not a lot has change since his departure. They remain fundamentally lazy, fundamentally ignorant of the subjects their roles pertain to and driven by weird ideologies that foment and reward fraud.
The fundamental issue with these reports and why nothing ever happens off the back of them is that they do focus on the wrong aspect of the issue. They always focus on the unresolvable, the fact that there is always a percentage of consumer desperate to be conned, desperate to throw all their money away, desperate for wild riches. You simply cannot help those people. That is the harsh, horrible and shocking lesson that I have learned over the years.
This group exists because at their core they live in a state of denial where listening to the majority who will tell them the opposite of what they want to hear is utterly toxic to them.
What shocked me was that there is a group of people and this type of person spans all socio-economic groups and cultures who naturally wants and need to follow a charismatic leader and will lock out all reality and common sense in order to get what they want.
You cannot save ot protect these people from themselves.
All you can do is mitigate the risk and the damage by specifically targeting those who feed off this endless herd.
And this is where both the FCA and these reports fail again and again and again. They focus on the individual victims instead of those that feed off them.
The FCA sees itself fundamentally as a social service to deliver platitudes to victims after the event and to hand out a bit of other people's money. It doesn't see itself as any kind of organisation to look at and target those carrying out the crimes at any stage of that person's career.
We all know who and where these people are. We can tell the FCA. We can hand it to them on a platter and over the course of the last 20 years they have never done anything other than let the fraud continue to its end, let everyone involved make their money and then they will step in with platitudes and cash while talking about lessons being learned.
If you were looking at this decades long track record of enabling and protecting of the same people year after year then one would draw the simple conclusion that such an organisation worked for these people and was in on the gigs but having met enough of them over the years the reality is that they are just lazy, dim, ignorant and working to a different agenda.
And the FCA's response before even digesting the report:
'“We have learned from historic issues and transformed as an organisation so we can deliver for consumers, the market and the wider economy.”'
A clear and overt lie, simply issued without thought because lying comes so naturally to the organisation. Not overt criminal lying but that political lying where you just say what people want to hear so they can leave you alone, Bank the cheque, tock that box and move on to the next thing.
'The report concluded the FCA was "incompetent at best, dishonest at worst", that its actions were "slow and inadequate" and that its leaders were "opaque and unaccountable".
It said the FCA had failed to properly investigate and act on information provided by whistleblowers and it said a transformation programme undertaken by the regulator had "not worked".
The report was carried out by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Investment Fraud and Fairer Financial Services, made up of 30 MPs and 14 members of the House of Lords.
Current and former FCA staff said the regulator had a “defective culture” in which “errors and inaction" were "too common”.'
https://www.ft.com/content/bb421a36-d344-46d5-badf...
https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2024/nov/26/f...
Under Andrew 'wake me up for my free lunch or if the FBI call' Bailey it did reach an all time low of doing absolutely nothing unless asked to by the European regulator, the FBI or the Prime Minister. Along with its policy of zero policing and clean up only but not a lot has change since his departure. They remain fundamentally lazy, fundamentally ignorant of the subjects their roles pertain to and driven by weird ideologies that foment and reward fraud.
The fundamental issue with these reports and why nothing ever happens off the back of them is that they do focus on the wrong aspect of the issue. They always focus on the unresolvable, the fact that there is always a percentage of consumer desperate to be conned, desperate to throw all their money away, desperate for wild riches. You simply cannot help those people. That is the harsh, horrible and shocking lesson that I have learned over the years.
This group exists because at their core they live in a state of denial where listening to the majority who will tell them the opposite of what they want to hear is utterly toxic to them.
What shocked me was that there is a group of people and this type of person spans all socio-economic groups and cultures who naturally wants and need to follow a charismatic leader and will lock out all reality and common sense in order to get what they want.
You cannot save ot protect these people from themselves.
All you can do is mitigate the risk and the damage by specifically targeting those who feed off this endless herd.
And this is where both the FCA and these reports fail again and again and again. They focus on the individual victims instead of those that feed off them.
The FCA sees itself fundamentally as a social service to deliver platitudes to victims after the event and to hand out a bit of other people's money. It doesn't see itself as any kind of organisation to look at and target those carrying out the crimes at any stage of that person's career.
We all know who and where these people are. We can tell the FCA. We can hand it to them on a platter and over the course of the last 20 years they have never done anything other than let the fraud continue to its end, let everyone involved make their money and then they will step in with platitudes and cash while talking about lessons being learned.
If you were looking at this decades long track record of enabling and protecting of the same people year after year then one would draw the simple conclusion that such an organisation worked for these people and was in on the gigs but having met enough of them over the years the reality is that they are just lazy, dim, ignorant and working to a different agenda.
And the FCA's response before even digesting the report:
'“We have learned from historic issues and transformed as an organisation so we can deliver for consumers, the market and the wider economy.”'
A clear and overt lie, simply issued without thought because lying comes so naturally to the organisation. Not overt criminal lying but that political lying where you just say what people want to hear so they can leave you alone, Bank the cheque, tock that box and move on to the next thing.
I work in in an industry regulated by the FCA and have heard similar complaints about them over and over. I'm in IT so I don't have a direct interest but you've nicely summarised many of the conversations I've witnessed. And yet, we bend over backwards to comply with their regulations.
DonkeyApple said:
There is always a percentage of consumer desperate to be conned, desperate to throw all their money away, desperate for wild riches. You simply cannot help those people. That is the harsh, horrible and shocking lesson that I have learned over the years.
This group exists because at their core they live in a state of denial ... you cannot save or protect these people from themselves. And this is where both the FCA and these reports fail again and again and again. They focus on the individual victims instead of those that feed off them.
To the tune of Sergeant Pepper,This group exists because at their core they live in a state of denial ... you cannot save or protect these people from themselves. And this is where both the FCA and these reports fail again and again and again. They focus on the individual victims instead of those that feed off them.
"I don't really want to stop the show
But I thought you might like to know
That the singer's gonna sing a song
And he wants you all to sing along
So let me introduce to you
The one and only ...... Bitcoin."
Published today, FCA says 12% of British adults now own some crypto. Meanwhile many professional investment managers don't go near it.
https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-fin...
Potentially the biggest Ponzi of all time.
I've worked pretty much exclusively for firms that trade with other firms, not the bits of the organisation that deal with the public, so the regulatory scrutiny I've witnessed is all about not manipulating markets, managing your own risk competently and reporting financial data to the regulator accurately. I've never gained the warm, fuzzy feeling that the world is being made safer by the UK's regulators except when the Bank of England steps in to prop someone up ... that's like watching a 15 stone, 6'8" headmaster breaking up a scrap between a couple of 5 year olds.
A bunch of things that you might hope a regulator could do are pretty much impossible in practice, e.g. spotting someone in a firm or the firm itself deliberately taking the piss. The damage caused by the piss-taking is almost always the first evidence that is visible externally. But even doing what seems like simple stuff, like monitoring the levels of self-reported market risk being run by an institution, seems to be beyond some of the regulators. Shortly after the credit crunch, so pre-FCA, I worked for a bank that traded emerging market credit derivatives and sovereign debt, so you might think there'd be a bit of focus on the risk we were reporting to the regulator. In fact we ballsed up and reported all of our trading activity as if we were only selling credit risk, instead of reporting what we actually did which was to act as a middle man, buying and selling equal amounts of risk and therefore running no risk at all on average. We misreported our trading activity every day for months. If the data we were reporting had genuinely reflected our trades, we'd have been running a preposterous amount of risk and would have blown our capital adequacy requirements out of the water after the first few days. Did the regulator ask us what the hell we were doing? No. We heard nothing from them. Eventually we spotted the reporting error ourselves.
Knowing how ramshackle most banks' internal market risk aggregation processes are (i.e. most banks have a fair idea what individual traders or desks have done, but struggle to collate that data across the entire bank), I instinctively have very little faith that a regulator is capable of accurately consuming all the data that is getting fed to them each day by all the institutions they're supposed to be regulating. I expect it is a tsunami of s
t in, st out, where all the limit or anomaly detection alerts are ever highlighting is bad or misinterpreted data.
A bunch of things that you might hope a regulator could do are pretty much impossible in practice, e.g. spotting someone in a firm or the firm itself deliberately taking the piss. The damage caused by the piss-taking is almost always the first evidence that is visible externally. But even doing what seems like simple stuff, like monitoring the levels of self-reported market risk being run by an institution, seems to be beyond some of the regulators. Shortly after the credit crunch, so pre-FCA, I worked for a bank that traded emerging market credit derivatives and sovereign debt, so you might think there'd be a bit of focus on the risk we were reporting to the regulator. In fact we ballsed up and reported all of our trading activity as if we were only selling credit risk, instead of reporting what we actually did which was to act as a middle man, buying and selling equal amounts of risk and therefore running no risk at all on average. We misreported our trading activity every day for months. If the data we were reporting had genuinely reflected our trades, we'd have been running a preposterous amount of risk and would have blown our capital adequacy requirements out of the water after the first few days. Did the regulator ask us what the hell we were doing? No. We heard nothing from them. Eventually we spotted the reporting error ourselves.
Knowing how ramshackle most banks' internal market risk aggregation processes are (i.e. most banks have a fair idea what individual traders or desks have done, but struggle to collate that data across the entire bank), I instinctively have very little faith that a regulator is capable of accurately consuming all the data that is getting fed to them each day by all the institutions they're supposed to be regulating. I expect it is a tsunami of s
t in, st out, where all the limit or anomaly detection alerts are ever highlighting is bad or misinterpreted data.MaxFromage said:
We reported an Insurance broker for relieving his client account of £250K. The broker was happy for us to report him as he couldn't stop his wife taking the money and that would stop it 
FCA weren't interested.
That’s totally inconsistent, but they have banned a few from working in the past.FCA weren't interested.
The idiots who colluded to bring down LIBOR springs to mind, as does the guy who avoided buying rail tickets for a long period.
It's always been a toothless lap-dog and it is probably pre-programmed to be a toothless lap-dog.
If the employees were capable enough to be able to uncover complex bank-fraud, then presumably they would be head-hunted by the same banks at 10x salary?
The only way to make it work, would be to put the employees on commission, based on what fraud they uncover/prosecute.
If the employees were capable enough to be able to uncover complex bank-fraud, then presumably they would be head-hunted by the same banks at 10x salary?
The only way to make it work, would be to put the employees on commission, based on what fraud they uncover/prosecute.
Gassing Station | Finance | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff