Tag Archives: reguators

The Co-Op Bank has revealed its 2015 half-year results. And they are not pleasant reading. It has made a statutory loss before taxation of £204m, considerably worse than the £77m loss reported in the 2014 half-year accounts. And the Board advises that the bank will not return to profit for another couple of years.The background to this horrible report is the Bank of England's stress tests last autumn. I didn't bother to look at the results at the time, since it was always obvious that the...

This is not what you think it is. And it is not what I intended to write about, either. I was going to write about Latvia as it is now, after the deepest recession in the world in 2008-9 and an excruciatingly painful front-loaded fiscal consolidation. Has it really recovered, or is it just marking time?But in looking at Latvia now, I find myself drawn to its history. Latvia's unusual response to the kicking it got in 2008 was because of its history. It had a deep recession 1991-3 and a severe...