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As the chatter intensifies around how banks’ capital bases should look in the future, so do the voices of those who think that hybrids within it has no future.
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When Oswald Gruebel appointed joint chief executives to run UBS investment bank at the end of April, the joke was that he did so because turning around the troubled division was more than a one-man job. David Rothnie looks at how the two co-heads are working together and what impressions they have made both inside and outside the Swiss bank.
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While Bernie Madoff appeared to live in Neverland, and Michael Jackson really did live in Neverland, the US and UK governments are just living on the never never. Gary Jenkins finds that the mixture of celebrity grief, the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme and huge deficits is making him have strange thoughts.
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After the storms of the final quarter of 2008 and the first three months of 2009 the sun is shining on European debt capital markets. But which banks have been making hay and which ones have got stuck in the manure? EuroWeek takes a look at the top six. Next week: the rest.
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Fitch’s decision to review its approach to rating structured notes is the result of fear of regulators and investors’ lawyers. Any changes the agency might be able to make are unlikely to help the market.
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Standard & Poor’s has got it in the neck for downgrading state-owned companies in the Gulf. This is unfair on the agency. Instead, the onus should be on the region’s governments to make known their intentions about government-related entity debt well in advance.
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The appointment of two Britons, Adair Turner and Paul Tucker, to chair key taskforces within the Financial Stability Board shows that the UK’s influence in setting the global regulatory agenda may not be as diminished as continental Europe had once thought.
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Opportunistic bids and unsuccessful offers threaten to become as much of a trend in subordinated liability management exercises as the triumphant raising of core tier one capital. But that’s no bad thing — any choice for investors is better than no choice at all.
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Cycles of boom and bust are a natural, ineradicable feature of the markets — just as the psyche of a credit analyst demands a villain on which to blame its troubles. When it comes to this financial crisis, Gary Jenkins knows who the real culprit is.
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Banks have started hiring again — leaving their truce over pay and bonuses in tatters. Firms are accusing each other of irresponsibility at odds with the need for them to work together on the pressing issue of reform, writes David Rothnie.