Cable: UBS loss proves need for reform

BRITISH business secretary Vince Cable said UBS’s $2.3 billion (€1.68bn) unauthorised trading loss underlines the case for John Vickers’s plan to force banks to insulate their consumer units from their investment banking operations.

“If there were any doubts about the need for radical reform, the UBS rogue trader has dispelled them, because we simply cannot have rogue institutions exposing taxpayers to the risk of exploding financial weapons of mass destruction,” Mr Cable told the Liberal Democrat conference yesterday.

The loss at UBS, first estimated at $2bn, and the charging of a 31-year-old trader with fraud and false accounting were announced on September 15, three days after Mr Vickers published the final report of his Independent Commission on Banking.