• Investment banks have been hit by Libor and foreign exchange scandals
• Traders’ chats show culture of joking about ripping off clients
• Now most major banks have banned mobiles from the trading floor and increased surveillance of emails and instant messages
• Some bankers have left the industry saying ‘this job used to be fun’ 

City bankers have been banned from using their phones at work, swearing in emails and talking to their rivals as part of a wide-ranging crackdown on their behaviour in the wake of recent scandals sweeping the industry, it has emerged.

Institutions desperate to clean up their act after being fined millions for Libor fraud and currency rigging have imposed tough new rules on employees’ behaviour in the office, MailOnline can reveal.

Investment banks have had their reputations damaged by evidence that traders were conniving to make profits by rigging key benchmarks – often losing their clients money…

Most board members in June received restricted stock worth approximately $36,000, meaning that even the lowest-paid board member will now make nearly $280,000 a year.

A bank spokesman pointed out that most of its board members haven’t received a raise since 2006 and that their responsibilities have increased greatly since then. Bank of Americaboard members earn more than the median pay for other companies in the S&P 500, but their base pay was less than that of directors at some other big banks.

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Below is an excerpt from a very informative article written by Jeff Nielson on Sprott Money. This is a must read for anyone following my site. Back in 2005-2006, I told friends and family, actually anyone who would listen to me, that housing prices were being artificially inflated and this would end badly. As we all know, the housing market crashed in 2008. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of persons lost their homes through foreclosure. This has been termed as the biggest land grab in history.

In the past couple of years, I have seen the same trend that was happening in 2005-2006. Once again, housing prices are skyrocketing. Because we have not fully recovered globally from the Great Recession, the results this time will be far more catastrophic.

We already saw that having only one buyer in the market meant that real estate prices would go as…