North America

The US market is due a shakeout as recession looms.

Investors continue to shy away from currency-hedged ETFs despite their positive short- and medium-term performance.

Frequent issuers on both sides of the Atlantic are exploring new ways to concentrate their high-quality liabilities into fewer more-liquid bonds to avoid paying a premium as markets sell off.

The damage done to mid-cap equities coverage by unbundling research is ever harder to ignore. It will not be easy to lower this self-imposed barrier to improved capital-markets access for fast-growing businesses in Europe.

Analysts believe Virtu Financial’s acquisition of ITG is largely a positive development for customers of both firms and the wider FX market, despite lingering concerns over access to institutional customer data.

Investors' sudden obsession with whether or not a flattening yield curve heralds a recession is a distraction from more profound concerns about the state of financial markets.

CLSNet – a new payments netting service for FX trades – aims to reduce costs and increase liquidity for market participants.

UniCredit’s €3 billion deal is a harsh demonstration of market dynamics.

The Trump administration has begun the process of ostracizing Iranian finance. Bankers there are hanging on to some rare good news, but how long will it be till they are back to square one?

The role of quantitative traders in the FX market is becoming ever more significant, as the amount of business executed via algorithms continues to increase.

Over the last two years, Bank of America has been overhauling its low-to-moderate income business, redesigning branches and products, improving employee retention and working with community partners, but will the bank get the credit its actions deserve?

The amount of dry powder that private equity firms now have means they are sometimes putting even more than 50% equity into deals – it’s a huge cushion that is contributing to reckless lending behaviour in the debt markets. But are lenders taking too much comfort from a buffer that could rapidly disappear?

A string of jumbo strategic corporate deals made 2018 one of the busiest years ever in M&A, but falling equity markets, slowing economies, rising debt costs and geopolitical uncertainties have now dimmed the outlook severely. M&A bankers hope that private equity buyers, with $1 trillion of equity to put to work, will pick up the baton and that activist investors will stop corporate executives from quietly jamming those takeover and disposal plans back into the freezer.

Jon ‘Mystic Mac’ Macaskill looks ahead at possible highlights for markets in 2019.

Thirty-year mortgages on houses in cyclone, wildfire, flood and drought zones? Systemic risk is building.

Analysts are reflecting uncertainty over the fallout for Goldman Sachs from the 1MDB affair, but with the stock taking a rare tumble below book value, markets seem to be pricing in much more bad news to come.

At the tail end of 2018, banks still seem to be a long way from equality.

Under-investment in post-trade infrastructure is driving interest in distributed ledger technology as a means of reducing back-office costs.

Environmental and social issues not separate; BlackRock still not voting on climate reporting.

$2.4 billion in dedicated mandates; expectations to reach $20 billion to $30 billion by 2023.

Credit Suisse’s CEO says his firm stands out in Europe: the numbers suggest he’s right

JPM wants to become the top transaction bank in the world – Takis Georgakopoulos, global head of treasury services, tells Euromoney how the bank will do it.

Founders claim existing meat-production business model at risk from stranded assets as interest in meat-free diet grows.

The distinction between retail and institutional FX business is well established, but there is a growing sense that both types of client can be supported on the same platform.

Even as the most infamous cryptocurrencies crashed this year, new ones were already emerging, designed to peg their value to fiat currencies. The most popular of the so-called stablecoins, Tether, broke its peg to the dollar in October, raising questions over the best design for these instruments and the worry that they may be just the latest crypto fad to sucker in the unwary. But if they succeed, stablecoins could prove a tipping point for broader crypto adoption and the reinvention of money.

Ken Moelis lived up to his nickname ‘Ken of Arabia’ when he showed up at the Saudi Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh in late October in his brave pursuit of future fee income despite the risk of international opprobrium.

When the financial crisis hit and retail banks – desperate to cut costs – closed less profitable branches, they did so chiefly in rural towns, or low- to moderate-income (LMI) communities.

Investors throw money at cash-burning issuers as concern over leveraged finance grows.

Rates are only rising because economies are doing so well and there is no need to panic, even if risk assets do sell off, at least according to the sell side.

A strong third quarter from Morgan Stanley was the highlight of a mixed bag of numbers, while Goldman Sachs’ incoming CFO offered more glimpses of the future.