A year after UBS Group AG completed its emergency takeover of failing rival Credit Suisse, the project is faring better than the Swiss bank dared hope. It’s cut unwanted assets, people and costs faster than it promised — enabling it to deliver forecast-beating profits so far in 2024.
Investor complacency is often blamed when rising stock markets ignore potentially unsettling data for weeks and then viciously sell off. But this very human-sounding characteristic mostly isn’t in the minds of traders: It’s baked into the structure of modern investment strategies.
The barbarians are back at the gates. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are confident that their most important clients are about to get active after a long spell on the sidelines and help goose the long-awaited revival in investment banking fees.
Life has been getting busier for investment bankers, but dealmakers aren’t cashing any checks yet. A stream of big-ticket merger and acquisition announcements this year bodes well for future revenue and bonuses, but no one gets paid until deals are completed. And that might not happen until late 2024 or even next year.
The dearth of private equity deal-making has been a nightmare for big investment banks used to getting 20% to 30% of their total advisory revenue from the industry.
Big US banks look to be getting their way in the fight over tougher capital rules. The Federal Reserve is talking to other regulators about changes to the updated standards that were proposed last July, according to Bloomberg News, which could mean capital demands increasing by less than one-third of what was originally envisaged.
Norinchukin Bank is best known outside of Japan as an investing whale in the market for bonds that package up loans to private equity businesses, known as collateralized loan obligations.
The fortunes of Silicon Valley startups rose and fell together like never before in recent years. Partly that was due to the indiscriminate tidal wave of money that washed through venture capital, but it’s also because many business-to-business software startups are closely connected as each other’s customers.
It’s a year since the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank – and the renewed cries of “never again.” Almost instantly began inquiries to work out who to blame, as well as hurried efforts to tighten banking rules, raise capital demands and enact laws to make executives pay.
There are lies, damned lies and statistics – and then there’s IRR. The internal rate of return metric used by private-capital managers has long had critics in finance and academia because it is easily manipulated and hard to compare with the transparent returns of, say, stocks and bonds.
Brian Kelly is The Points Guy, a pioneer in the cottage industry that helps credit card users get the most out of airmiles and other rewards. He got into it when young out of a determination to always fly business class. His motivation? “I’m six-foot-seven!” he says.
Investors will literally beg Jamie Dimon not to retire: One did so at JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s investor day last year. But the chairman and chief executive officer of America’s biggest bank can’t do his job forever.
Time is tight for the Federal Reserve’s effort to redraw US bank capital rules, but they shouldn’t rush the job.
Investment bankers must at times bore themselves with their talk of “strong pipelines” and “active conversations,” the ever-present characteristics of even the worst markets.
Cevian Capital AB’s $1.3 billion bet on UBS Group AG is unusual in more ways than one. The Stockholm-based investment firm is typically a quiet activist, working behind the scenes to steer management thinking. This time it’s being very public about what looks like a straightforward value play.
The extraordinary hype around artificial intelligence this year touched the finance industry, too, but most banks have been rightly cautious about jumping directly onto the bandwagon. In such a tightly regulated business, the costs of getting it wrong could be extreme.
Big central banks are going to keep shrinking their balance sheets next year, pulling money out of the financial system, even if the fight against inflation looks to be won and interest rate cuts begin.
The rapid rise of funds that make loans directly to buyout deals and other highly indebted companies — known as private credit — is among the hottest topics in finance.
Sergio Ermotti promised ruthlessness in reshaping Credit Suisse Group AG, and the chief executive officer of UBS Group AG has been true to his word.
Few are saying it out loud, but it seems plenty of investment banking leaders think a big rebound in dealmaking and fundraising is around the corner.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Jamie Dimon calls it “over-earning,” but his isn’t the only bank that still hasn’t felt much pain from loan losses or rising deposit costs
Most voters aren’t going to get hot under the collar about battles in Washington, DC, over bank capital requirements, but they definitely relate to stories about home loans becoming more expensive or less available. That doesn’t mean debate is straightforward, especially once each side starts throwing numbers around.
When Congress voted in 2018 to give regional banks a break from stiffer post-crisis capital rules, it created a two-tier banking system in the US.
Hedge funds are in regulators’ sights again. Their risk-taking with borrowed money must be better monitored and will sometimes have to be limited, the head of a global group of supervisors told the Financial Times last week.
The chair of the Securities and Exchanges Commission has asked staffers to pore over thousands of messages collected from investment firms as part of its probe into industry use of WhatsApp and other non-official messaging channels, according to Reuters.
Investment bankers were finally starting to believe in the green shoots of capital-markets activity this month, but the Federal Reserve might now have crushed them under hawkish boots.
Banks are never fans of tougher regulation, but they really don’t like the overhaul of US capital rules proposed at the end of July by the Federal Reserve and other finance authorities. Lenders and their lobbyists have come out fighting.
Barclays Plc is trying to work out how to make the best of its payments business in its quest to increase the appeal of its shares. One option is selling a stake in the unit that handles card transactions for shopkeepers and other businesses, Bloomberg News reports.
UBS Group AG faced two big questions about its emergency rescue of Credit Suisse Group AG: How much profit would it make on the bargain deal? And would the distractions or taint of taking over the failing bank hurt its own business?
Bankers are warning that tougher capital rules being proposed by the Federal Reserve and other US regulators will push more risks out of well-regulated lenders and into markets.
Big US banks will have to clear significantly higher capital hurdles under long-awaited proposals announced by regulators Thursday. The good news for investors is that most of them are already there — and the few that aren’t should easily meet the tougher demands well before they need to.
Earnings reports on Friday showed Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. gained big time from their size and the extra support the Federal Reserve injected into the banking system in March.
Investment banking work has all but dried up and the private equity industry bears a lot of the blame. The bad news for those involved is that managers of buyout funds might struggle to get their flywheels spinning again even when the current economic uncertainty starts to clear up.
Five of the six biggest banks — all apart from Citigroup Inc. — are likely to see their capital requirements lowered for the year ahead after sailing through a tougher test than last year with smaller losses.
Investment-banking deals have a reputation as bloody affairs of rainmakers and traders fighting it out in a kind of full-contact version of musical chairs.
With the US debt ceiling standoff defused, the Treasury can start borrowing big money again. The government is forecast to issue up to $1 trillion of debt this year in short-term bills, sucking cash out of the US financial system.
What do Bill Hwang, the disgraced US investor, and Liz Truss, Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister, have in common?
