Investors will be watching Spain’s 2013 budget plan, to be announced today, for indications that the government is laying the ground for a bailout request. If it makes investors happy, it’s likely to make Spaniards mad, as demonstrations turned violent yesterday outside the Spanish parliament building in Madrid. In either case, Prime Minister Mariano Read More
When former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty was campaigning to be the Republican presidential nominee, he told reporters that his “truth message to Wall Street is going to be, ‘Get your snout out of the trough.’” Which, maybe that’s still his truth message? But instead of delivering it as co-chairman of Mitt Romney’s campaign, Governor Pawlenty will be speaking it as head of the Financial Services Roundtable, a banking industry lobby.
Somewhere, an algorithm read the coverage of yesterday’s Senate Banking Committee hearing on high-frequency trading, and figured it will take years for the government to hammer out reforms to fix market structure issues. Read More
IKB Deutsche Industriebank AG is suing everybody, or at least it seems that way: the German lender is suing Citigroup and Goldman Sachs over losses of $137.4 million and $73.2 million, respectively, on mortgage-backed securities. In May, the Dusseldorf-based lender sued Bank of America over losses of more than $200 million on mortgage Read More
A little over a month ago, The Wall Street Journal identified the Curse of Dick Fuld, after the bank bosses who picked assets off the carcass of Lehman Brothers resigned from their posts in unceremonious fashion.
First went Bob Diamond, who snapped up Lehman’s U.S. securities business for Barclays, and who stepped down at the beginning of July after his bank agreed to pay $450 million to settle an investigation into its efforts to manipulate interbank lending rates.
Next fell Nomura chief executive Kenichi Watanabe and chief operating officer Takumi Shibata—who led Nomura’s deal for Lehman’s European and Asian units—amid an insider trading scandal that roiled the Japanese firm.
This week, it seemed, Barclays and Nomura appeared to pare back their respective global ambitions in tandem. Read More
New Barclays boss Antony Jenkins is the only CEO of a global universal bank without a background in investment banking, and according to Bloomberg, the low-profile retail banker is everything that former CEO Bob Diamond wasn’t. Mr. Jenkins, the first in his family to attend university, started his career at Barclays in 1983 and, after a stint at Citi, returned in 2006. Barclays chairman Marcus Agius, expected to step down in the wake of the Libor scandal now that the task of replacing Mr. Diamond is complete, said that Mr. Jenkins stood out in a competitive field of candidates, according to The New York Times. Former U.K. financial services chief Paul Myners told Bloomberg that there were “probably less than four credible candidates, two of whom I know were approached and turned it down almost without any serious consideration.” Read More
Lawsuits against financial institutions under investigation for manipulating interbank lending rates such as Libor continue to pile up, according to The Wall Street Journal. Plaintiffs holding bonds that pay some amount above the Libor rate have the best chances at legal victory, The Journal says. The legal liability facing banks may total as much as $176 Read More
Faceplant: UBS saw profit fall 58 percent in the second quarter. The firm wasn’t helped by a $356 million loss connected to Facebook’s initial public offering, in which technical glitches at Nasdaq caused UBS to buy more shares than its clients had ordered. “We will take appropriate legal action against Nasdaq to address its Read More
‘Curse of Dick Fuld’: Ken Watanabe, chief executive officer of Nomura Holdings and the driving force behind the bank’s purchase of Lehman Brothers European and Asian operations, resigned as the company indicated that insider-trading offenses committed within the company go beyond those identified by Japanese regulators. Mr. Watanabe leaves Nomura three weeks after Robert Read More
For months, financial wags have been arguing over whether hard times at investment banks are cyclical downturn or representative of more permanent, secular change. (Jamie Dimon: “
Nomura’s board opposed the proposal. In other news, Nomura raised executive pay 79 percent last fiscal year, even as net income plunged 60 percent and shares reached Read More
Is he the most prolific attorney in the city you’ve never heard about?
Probably not.
Still, it’s possible to lose track of just how many deals Fried Frank partner Meyer Last inked in 2011. Call it the Jon Mechanic effect. Read More
