Category Archives: banking

The wager entered into between me and Jesse Eisinger: that investment banks’ bonus pool this year – in aggregate – will be at least 90% of the size it was last year. If it is, I win a bottle of … Continue reading →

Jesse Eisinger has the cover story of the November issue of Portfolio with an obituary for Wall Street. I wonder what Barry Ritholtz thinks about this: Barry is structurally bearish, and might be inclined to agree with Jesse’s thesis, but … Continue reading →

Rick Bookstaber makes a good point today. Across Wall Street, heads of fixed income have been losing their jobs in the wake of trading losses. Now these men had a job: to take on risk in the fixed-income markets. When … Continue reading →

I’m not a fan of this Citigroup shake-up. The ousted Thomas Maheras might have sat uncomfortably in his co-head role at the investment bank with Michael Klein (co-heads nearly always sit uncomfortably), but he was – is – a very … Continue reading →

What is the point of Value-at-Risk? Yesterday, in a mildly confused post, I said that if a bank loses more than its VaR six days in one quarter, that’s "a sign of utter cluelessness". In fact, it’s not quite as … Continue reading →

Morgan Stanley has some of the most sophisticated risk-management systems on planet earth. And yet, somehow, The company disclosed today that daily trading losses during the quarter exceeded the firm’s trading value-at- risk calculation on six days during the quarter. … Continue reading →

When Northern Rock started falling apart, it prompted people like accountant Richard Murphy to start taking a detailed look at its borrowing structure. Like all banks, Northern Rock structured a very complex series of bankruptcy-remote special-purpose vehicles to do its … Continue reading →

The RBS-led consortium has now officially won ABN Amro, and the WSJ has an excellent play-by-play of how the deal went down, including a graph of how the consortium members’ stocks have been doing this year. While RBS is down … Continue reading →

The WSJ has a fabulous "Heard on the Street" column today, worrying about all these losses being announced by big universal banks: Citi, UBS, Deutsche. Are they worried that the losses are so big they will damage the banks’ franchise? … Continue reading →

DealBook asks today whether Toronto-Dominion Bank is overpaying for Commerce Bank. They’re both customer-serviced, says RBC analyst Gerard Cassidy, but they have very different profit margins: The difference, Mr. Cassidy told The Times, is that Toronto-Dominion, which operates in a … Continue reading →

The $8.5 billion acquisition of Commerce Bancorp by Canada’s Toronto-Dominion Bank is being greeted with something of a shrug this morning. When Commerce CEO Vernon Hill was ousted in June, it seemed only a matter of time before the company … Continue reading →

Last night I talked to Chris Coulthrust (not Colthrust) of Applied Cognetics, about the NetBank implosion. Understandably, for someone who’s just lost access to what he thought was money safely in the bank, he’s not a happy bunny. And equally … Continue reading →

It hasn’t got a lot of headlines, but the US has now officially suffered its biggest bank failure since 1993. NetBank had $2.5 billion in assets, and somehow contrived to lose more than $200 million in 2006. Deposits were insured … Continue reading →

It doesn’t make a whole lot of intuitive sense, on its face. The investment banks are up to their eyeballs in structured products and quantitative strategies, while the big global universal banks are heavily diversified among different products and countries. … Continue reading →