Private banks touting plans to step up hiring in Asia are undermining the industry by driving up compensation expectations, said the regional head of Credit Suisse Group AG’s Clariden Leu unit.
“If you go by the numbers, it makes me puke: I don’t know who these people are, and why they’re talking like that,” Singapore-based Jimmy Lee, a 20-year private banking veteran, said in an interview on June 11. “They’re shooting themselves in the foot.”
Fortis, controlled by Indian billionaire brothers Malvinder Singh and Shivinder Singh, is also in talks to hire RBS (RBS.L) to help raise funds, said the sources, who declined to be identified as the matter is not yet public.
The worst may not be over for Singapore banks despite their strong 1Q10 earnings, says NRA Capital analyst Lynn Look, according to Dow Jones.
Look notes 1Q results driven by strong recovery in stock markets, which boosted non-interest income and by lower provisions but says non-performing loans may not have peaked. “NPL rates of less than 3% can’t be the worst to expect from a crisis that has sent the whole world into a tailspin,” she says.
Max Keiser – journalist, former Wall Street broker and options trader, and inventor of the software which is now being used for high frequency trading – claims that the big banks retroactively allocate losing trades to their clients, and keep the winni…
Wesley James Moxey has resigned as independent director wef May 20
Reason for cessation: Mr. Moxey informed the company that he plans to start a new venture in the coming months which will require a substantial time commitment. As a result, Mr. Moxey has elected to resign from the Board.
Private banks are recommending that clients allocate more money to hedge funds, in particular event-driven funds that will benefit from an expected surge in mergers and acquisitions and debt restructuring.
Unlike in 2009 when stocks rallied across the board, the overall market direction is less certain this year and the best returns will likely come from event-driven managers who can better navigate the twists and turns in M&As compared with traditional long-only and exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
As I wrote last October: Congressmen Brad Sherman and Paul Kanjorski and Senator James Inhofe all say that the government warned of martial law if Tarp wasn’t passed. And Rahm Emanuel famously said: Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I…
Granted, the $700 billion dollar TARP bailout was a massive bait-and-switch. The government said it was doing it to soak up toxic assets, and then switched to saying it was needed to free up lending. It didn’t do that either. Indeed, the Fed doesn’t …
Recent selloff has brought Singapore bank stocks to more attractive levels, says Citigroup.
As the Wall Street Journal points out, the Federal Reserve might open up its “swap lines” again to bail out the Europeans:The Fed is considering whether to reopen a lending program put in place during the financial crisis in which it shipped dollars ov…
As of 2007, the bottom 50% of the U.S. population owned only one-half of one percent of all stocks, bonds and mutual funds in the U.S. On the other hand, the top 1% owned owned 50.9%.From the San Francisco Chronicle:Half of America has only 0.5% …
Singapore financial stocks, such as DBS Bank (DBSM.SI) and Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC.SI) and UOB (UOB.SI), are likely to be in focus on Monday after the European Union and the IMF agreed a US$147 billion ($201 billion) bailout for Greece.
US stocks tumbled on Friday to close out the worst week since January as news of a criminal probe into Goldman Sachs (GS.N) unnerved investors already anxious about the prospects for heavy regulation from Washington. Here are some stocks and factors to watch:
If we broke up standard oil, we can break up the giant banks.Says who?Senator Ted Kaufman (interviewed recently by The American Prospect’s Tim Fernholz): You and Senator Sherrod Brown have proposed an amendment that would cap the size of the largest ba…
As everyone from Paul Krugman to Simon Johnson has noted, the banks are so big and politically powerful that they have bought the politicians and captured the regulators.But the giant banks are not only dangerous because they skew the political system….
Positive Wall Street cues, easing concerns over Greece’s debt situation lift Singapore shares, pushing STI closer to 3,000, which may provide resistance. Index last +0.8% at 2,982.15 at 9:29 a.m., says Dow Jones.
A friend on the Hill sent me the following internal letter being sent around the House to gather cosponsors. Too Big to Fail is Too Big to Regulate Cosponsor H.R. 5159 – The Safe, Accountable, Fair and Efficient Banking Act of 2010 April…
In response to the chorus of experts calling for the mega-banks to be broken up, defenders of our current banking system argue that because Canada’s banking system is pretty stable, and Canada has some giant banks, size isn’t the issue.This might be a …
