Three Charts Show How A Handful of Banks Came To Dominate The UK | ||
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It includes the bizarre cabbage-based torment of employees who weren't making sales. But it also breaks down how British banking ended up in its current state, with very little competition and a handful of enormous financial institutions dominating high-street banking. Three charts explain the phenomenon. First of all, here's how 16 major banks and two building societies just became the five massive institutions that dominate the UK. It's reminiscent of a similar and famous chart made by Mother Jones showing just how many US banks used to exist and how they have been merged and consolidated into a series of behemoths.
But that's not actually the full story, because it underestimates the amount of variety in financial institutions that existed 50 years ago and has since disappeared. The building society, a mutual sort of deposit and lending organisation, used to be once of the major parts of British household finance. Building societies still have significant assets, but their numbers have plummeted. In 1960, there were 720 building societies, down from 2,286 in 1900. Today, there are fewer than 10:
So the UK was left without building societies. But what about banks? In the US, thousands of small banks exist alongside the giants. Why not in the UK? Well, they did. But they started dying off even longer ago. At the end of the Napoleonic wars, there were more than 700 private banks, for a population of just over 10 million. These institutions were run by partners who were personally liable for their performance. Over time, they were replaced by a dwindling number of joint-stock banks (in which managers were not liable for their performance).
These banks merged with and acquired one another until there were very few, but the ones that did exist were large and had a lot of branches. This change, combined with the decline of building societies over the 100 years after, goes a long way to explaining why British banking looks so much like a cartel today. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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How France's History May Be Sinking The Sale Of Mistral Warships To Russia | ||
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The current difficulties surrounding France's sale of two Mistral-class helicopter carriers to Russia mark another awkward chapter in the country's history of arms sales. France currently ranks fifth among the world's largest arms exporting nations, according to the independent Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The country accounted for 4% of global exports between 2009-2013, down from 9% between 2004-2008, placing it behind only the US, Russia, Germany and China. Although France is by no means the only country to have a checkered history with regards to arms exports, it nevertheless has made some significant missteps in recent history. And the memory of these might help explain, at least in part, the French government's hesitation over handing over the first of the Mistral warships to Russia while the crisis in Ukraine rumbles on. Here are a few of France's least-proud moments. The sale of Exocet missiles to Argentina
By 1982 France had supplied five of these missiles to the country. Then on April 2, 1982, Argentine forces invaded the Falkland Islands, which had been held by Britain for 150 years, beginning the Falklands War. France's then President Francois Mitterrand responded to the invasion by declaring an embargo on any further French arms sales and assistance to Argentina (although later reports suggested a French technical team remained in the country to ensure that the weapon system was in working order). But the presence of the Exocet missiles remained a major concern for British military commanders. Their fears proved well-founded. On May 4th one of the Exocets hit the British destroyer HMS Sheffield, killing 20 of her crew and sinking the ship. The sale of Mirage F-1s and the 'lease' of five Super Étendard jets to Iraq before the Iran-Iraq War The sinking of the Sheffield was a high-profile demonstration of the Exocet system's effectiveness, and may actually have boosted demand for the missiles. One customer in particular took a keen interest in acquiring them — Iraq. As Dr Pierre Razoux, senior research adviser at the NATO Defense College in Rome, writes in his 2013 essay "France's involvement in the Iran-Iraq War": The Iraqi leadership regarded the aircraft as the ideal weapons system to launch an effective attack on the Iranian terminal in Kharg and oil traffic to Iran. The Dassault company...offered to sell the Iraqis twenty-four of the Mirage F-1 fighters that had been upgraded to carry and fire two Exocet missiles each...In the meantime, the French government agreed to 'lease' Iraq five Super Étendard fighters from its own naval inventory. Unfortunately the deal rocked the already delicate relations between Iraq and its neighbour Iran, with the Iranian leadership indicating that it would amount to a casus belli if the planes were delivered. Undeterred, the French government pressed on launching "Operation Sugar", whereby five French fighter pilots employed by the Dassault company equipped with false passports secretly flew the five jets to the Qayarah West base in northern Iraq, according to Razoux. The flight included having to refuel on a French aircraft carrier based off Cyprus and a brief stop-off in Turkey before flying along the Turkey-Syria border at low altitude to avoid Syrian radar. Whether the delivery was spotted or not by Iran remains unknown, but two weeks after their delivery a truck bomb hit a building in the Lebanese capital Beirut where a contingent of French paratroopers were stationed. The French authorities believed the attacks were ordered by Iran. Over the next few years France delivered 29 Mirage F-1s to Baghdad in deals that were worth as much as $500 million, some of which was paid for with crude oil according to the US Library of Congress. While French aircraft were used extensively in the 1984 tanker wars between Iraq and Iran, these same aircraft became a major problem only three years later.
Arms deals with Libya between 2004 and 2009 In October 2004, the European Union ended 11 years of sanctions against Libya. In particular, the deal included easing an arms embargo in exchange for a commitment from the Gaddafi government to give up the development of weapons of mass destruction. That deal paved the way for European arms dealers to rekindle their relationship with the country. And so they did. Between 2004-2009 the EU granted export licenses for €834.5m worth of arms and ammunition to the former Italian colony. The vast majority of this was provided by Italy, Germany, the UK and, of course, France.
Once again France's hold on the military jet market was in evidence, with the country securing €126 million worth of contracts with Libya pipping Italy as the largest supplier of planes over the period. Furthermore, it was also the largest supplier of bombs, rockets and missiles to the former pariah state. Indeed in 2008, France sold just shy of €9 million worth of munitions to Gaddafi.
Three years later the West, with France among the leading protagonists, was drawn to intervene in Libya as the country descended into a brief but bloody civil war that saw forces loyal to Gaddafi fire into residential neighbourhoods. Although there is no suggestion that any of the countries that supplied arms to the country could reasonably have known what would transpire, it was a stark reminder of the risks inherent in these types of deals with potentially unstable states. As the charts above show, France is far from the only country that has seen arms deals come back to bite it. Yet with all of these awkward historical examples, it is perhaps no surprise that French President François Hollande has proven reluctant to OK the sale of the Mistral ships while the situation in Ukraine remains so unstable. This will be of particular concern since the second of the two ships, the Sevastopol, is due to join up with the Russian Black Sea fleet based in the (recently annexed) Crimean port of the same name. With both sides in the Ukraine conflict seemingly unable or unwilling to stick to a ceasefire deal, Russia may well be waiting a long time yet on its order. Join the conversation about this story »  | ||
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In the early 1980s the French-built anti-ship Exocet missile, which skims over the water at a height of 1-2 metres, making it hard to detect by radar and difficult to hit with conventional arms, was much in demand. 
On the night of May 17, 1987, the USS Stark was hit by two Exocet missiles fired by an Iraqi F-1 Mirage jet. In the words of 
Perhaps unsurprisingly considering their shared history, Italy was the largest provider of arms to Tripoli in the five years after the end of the embargo, selling around €277 million worth to the country. However, France came a close second with just over €210 million worth of military exports.
China home prices fall in November despite rate cut | ||
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Shanghai (AFP) - China's housing prices fell on a monthly basis for the seventh straight month in November, a survey showed Sunday, with the market yet to feel the full impact of an interest rate cut. The average price of a new home in China's 100 major cities was 10,589 yuan ($1,736) per square metre in November, down 0.38 percent from October, the independent China Index Academy said in a statement. The fall was a slight improvement from the 0.40 percent month-on-month drop in October, previous figures showed. "We expect the interest rate cut to kick in next year," Bai Yanjun, research director for the China Index Academy, told AFP. "We still believe the market is under downward pressure for the rest of 2014 because the current home inventory levels in first-tier and major second-tier cities are still high," he said. China cut both lending and deposit rates just over a week ago, and analysts said home mortgage buyers would be among the biggest beneficiaries. "The rate cut sends a strong signal that the property market will likely bottom out soon," China economist for Merrill Lynch Hong Kong, Lu Ting, said in a research note. On a year-on-year basis, China's new home prices fell 1.57 percent from the same month last year, far sharper that the annual fall of 0.52 percent in October, the academy said. But for China's ten biggest cities -- which tend to have the most active property markets -- new home prices rose 0.07 percent in November from October, marking the first gain after six months of declines, it said. The commercial city of Shanghai was the best performing with housing prices rising 1.18 percent in November from October to 32,140 yuan per square metre, making it the second most expensive city behind the capital Beijing. China had previously sought to rein in runaway property prices, a source of discontent among ordinary citizens, by introducing market control measures including limits on buying second and third homes. But cities began rolling back some of the measures this year, as China's economy slowed and the central government relented. The surprise interest rate cut was the first in more than two years, raising expectations the central bank will carry out further monetary easing to keep the world's second largest economy on track. China's central bank cut the benchmark one-year lending rate by 0.40 percentage points to 5.60 percent, and trimmed the one-year deposit rate by 0.25 percentage points to 2.75 percent.
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