Gisterenmiddag (26 juni) organiseerde Leergeld haar tweede evenement in Brussel. Leergeld, een initiatief van Europarlementslid Sander Loones (N-VA), wil mensen bewust maken van de impact van de Europese Centrale Bank (ECB) op hun financiën.
He believes that “it is much more likely that if there are systemic banking issues that currency problems will also arise.”
It is laudable that Prof. Balding summarizes his arguments. By being explicit about the assumptions, readers don’t just have to trust his opinion. Instead they can follow the logic and evaluate the strong and weaker points themselves.
2007 seems ages ago. It was the final year of another era, the time before the Crisis. Whatever you prefer to call it – credit crisis, debt crisis, global financial crisis, banking crisis – the crisis has scarred the shareholders of banks. Even though ten years have passed, most bank stocks still have not recovered to their pre-crisis highs.
This post looks at the evolution of the stock prices of the largest banks1 in Europe and the US. For European banks, I made a distinction between institutions with headquarters inside and outside the euro area. Continue reading “A lost decade (for bank investors)”
In an event that has been called the WannaCry ransomware attack, hackers encrypted data on computers all around the world. The victims – which included hospitals and car factories – had to pay ransom in Bitcoin to get their files back.
Computers without up to date operating systems were particularly vulnerable to the attack.
People who have never come into contact with the internal IT operations of a large company find this hard to understand. Why don’t companies just install the latest patches, like private persons do on their home computers?
KBC Group is de enige beursgenoteerde bank-verzekeraar die België nog rijk is2. Vandaag vond de jaarvergadering plaats in de hoofdzetel aan de Havenlaan.
De resultaten van 2016 en de andere cijfers kan je in het jaarverslag (pdf) vinden. Alle agendapunten werden met een ruime meerderheid van de aanwezige aandelen goedgekeurd.
In tegenstelling tot vorig jaar, kwamen er veel vragen uit het publiek. Een activistische aandeelhouder van de “groene petten” had vragen over de rol van KBC in het dossier van de Nationale Bank van België (NBB). Deze affaire bewaar ik tot laatst. Continue reading “Jaarvergadering KBC 2017”
Eén van de populairste artikels op deze site legt uit hoe de Belgische personenbelasting berekend wordt. Door de taxshift zijn enkele details niet meer up-to-date. Dit is de nieuwe versie voor 2017. Ik heb de voorbeelden opnieuw doorgerekend en vergeleken met vorig jaar. Je zal zien dat de personenbelasting wel degelijk gedaald is3.
Donderdag 13 juli is de deadline om je belastingen door te sturen via tax-on-web. De website heeft een knop waarmee je je belastingen kan laten berekenen.
Je kan dus laten voorspellen hoeveel je zal terugkrijgen of zal moeten bijbetalen van de belastingen.
Maar hoe werkt die berekening eigenlijk? Je krijgt een hele resem onbegrijpelijke sommen te zien, vol codes en onduidelijke ambtenarentaal zoals “om te slane belasting”.
Hieronder leg ik het simpelste voorbeeld uit: een alleenstaande zonder kinderen die heel het belastingjaar4 bij één werkgever werkte en geen andere inkomsten heeft dan zijn loon. Hij woont in Vlaanderen, vlakbij het werk, heeft geen huis en doet niet aan pensioensparen of andere zaken die recht geven op een belastingvermindering.
Wanneer je je loonbrief bekijkt, zie je dat er een (groot) verschil is tussen het brutoloon dat je werkgever betaalt, en het nettoloon dat op je rekening gestort wordt.
Er zijn twee belangrijke redenen waarom bruto en netto zo verschillend zijn: de RSZ en de personenbelasting. Van je brutoloon gaat 13,07% rechtstreeks naar de sociale zekerheid, de RSZ5. Deze RSZ bijdrage telt niet mee voor de berekening van jeinkomstenbelasting in Tax-on-web.
Het brutoloon (na aftrek van de RSZ-bijdrage) dat je verdiende in 2016 kan je vinden bij code 1250 van tax-on-web:
Banks create money. To be more precise, when a bank grants a loan, it simultaneously creates a deposit. Bank deposits are functionally equivalent to cash.
Economics education apparantly fails to pass on some elementary knowledge to students.
It doesn’t help that the activities of banks are often described as ‘monetary intermediation’. Intermediation implies that bankers are the middle men between borrowers and savers.
However, there exists a much better description for banks. In Dutch, the formal description of banks is “geldscheppende financiële instellingen”, which literally means “money-creating financial institutions”:
As far as I can tell, Dutch is the only European language in which banks are described as active money creators6. All other languages use ‘monetary intermediation’.
Maybe everybody should take a cue from Dutch and start saying ‘money creating institutions’ from now on, so we don’t have this debate a hundred years from now 😛
===
I explain how banks create money in Bankers are people, too. After you’ve read my book, you’ll know more about banking than many PhD economists!
Update 20 October 2019: the link to the Bank of England paper was broken. It’s fixed now, thanks to Anna for notifying me!
The launch of the report was accompanied by a symposium in Brussels on Tuesday. During an interesting panel discussion, it was debated how the ECB can improve the way it works. Carl Dolan and Leo Hoffmann-Axthelm from Transparency International EU stressed that the ECB had cooperated with the NGO.
Many topics were covered during the discussion. For example the status of whistleblowers, freedom of information requests, and the “cool-off period” demanded when ECB executives move to the private sector.
Or to be more precise, debate about the financial institutional framework edition.
How should banks be regulated? Ten years ago, this question would have only interested a few specialists. Discussions about bank supervision and the role of the central bank were way too boring for the general public7. Besides, bankers surely knew what they were doing?
The global financial crisis and its aftermath changed this complacent attitude. The existing rules did not prevent the worse financial crisis since the 1930s. Governments had to bail out banks at a moment’s notice. Politicians took drastic decisions during the panic of September 2008. While those actions were taken with little democratic oversight, national leaders8 were the only agents willing and able to stop the collapse.
The crisis spurred a thorough update of bank regulation. Both in the United States and in Europe, legislation was passed to make banks safer. Avoiding a repetition of ad-hoc bailouts became a priority. The U.S. got its Dodd-Frank Act. The European Union (EU) set up the European Banking Authority (EBA) and worked towards a banking union9. America and Europe implemented capital and liquidity standards based on the Basel III recommendations. Continue reading “What I like about America, finance edition”