Germany’s biggest bank is trying to make investment banking boring. The latest in our series of profiles of financial institutions after the crisis JOSEF ACKERMANN, the head of Deutsche Bank, combines a silky manner with blunt words. When the German government set up a bail-out fund to stabilise the country’s banking system, he said he would be “ashamed” to use it
Archive for category Banking News
The latest of our profiles of financial firms after the crisis looks at BTG Pactual, Brazil’s investment-banking powerhouse IN RECENT years investment banks were supposedly hijacked by boffins who used their nuclear-physics doctorates to devastating effect. Yet the industry has long been slave to a different tribe of scientists: the bulge-bracket Darwinists. They reckon only giant global firms can survive.
A slow fuse still burns on eastern Europe’s foreign-currency debts AFTER firefighters extinguish a blaze they usually look carefully for glowing embers before rolling up their hoses and heading off. With the worst of the banking crisis now receding in most rich countries, it is tempting to send the financial firefighters home.
International regulators are making progress on tackling too-big-to-fail banks TALK is cheap when it comes to solving the problem of too-big-to-fail banks. From the luxury of even today’s stuttering economic recovery it is easy to vow that next time lenders’ losses will be pushed onto their creditors, not onto taxpayers
The Basel club publishes new analysis on the impact of higher capital WHEN asked, before the crisis, about the right level of capital they should have, the bankers’ answer was simple: “As little as possible”. Now that the world has changed, their response has morphed to “less than what the regulators want”.
In the third of our profiles of financial institutions after the crisis, we look at Citigroup, a tarnished American icon WALTER WRISTON liked to contend that banks needed little capital as long as they were run well. On several occasions since the legendary Citicorp boss retired in 1984, the bank and its successor, Citigroup—created in a merger in 1998—have been caught embarrassingly short of the stuff. The latest blow-up was the nastiest
Europe’s banks are making money hand over fist. How odd A FEW weeks ago Europe’s banks were in real trouble.
Ahead of presidential elections, BNDES comes under scrutiny EIKE BATISTA, Brazil’s richest man, calls BNDES, the country’s state-owned development bank, “the best bank in the world”. But a former BNDES chairman, Luiz Carlos Mendonca de Barros, says it is a serpent’s egg—a reference to a film about the origins of the Nazi party. And a former central-bank chief, Gustavo Loyola, dubs the bank “Jurassic” and reckons its links with the treasury recall one of the worst periods of military rule.
Our series of profiles of firms after the crisis continues with Australia’s ANZ FOR its new headquarters in Melbourne, ANZ skipped the portraits of yesteryear’s leaders and the money museum that underpinned its lovely old cathedral of finance on Queen Street. Its new lobby is, in effect, an airport lounge, complete with showers and internet connections for travelling staff and clients. The architecture echoes the bank’s strategy: seize a moment when many of the world’s large financial institutions have been hopelessly distracted to carve out a franchise across Asia
