Macaskill on Markets

A US climate bill filled with green credits will create business for banks and provide relief from the backlash against ESG products.

West Virginia state treasurer Riley Moore has opened another front in a campaign by Republican officials in the US against banks that promote ESG policies.

HSBC Asset Management’s head of responsible investing has had it up to here with consultants and regulators lecturing him on climate change risk.

Standard & Poor’s met its late-April deadline for a response to a US Justice Department suit accusing the agency of fraudulently rating CDOs with an energetic rebuttal of the case for the prosecution.

In a July 2007 email exchange cited in the US government’s current case accusing Standard & Poor’s of defrauding investors with its CDO ratings, a recently hired analyst told an investment banking contact about the view among many employees that senior management at S&P had prevented downgrades to avoid alienating clients.

The annual report for 2012 released by UBS in March demonstrated that its management continues to flounder, while offering perverse hope that the disaster-prone bank might be stumbling towards a sustainable business model.

Euromoney columnist Jon Macaskill imagines how Doug L Braunstein, the former chief financial officer of JPMorgan, chronicled his testimony at last week's Senate hearing.

The currency war that many feared as an inevitable accompaniment to the credit crisis played out as more of a paint-ball contest until the recent sharp slide of the yen. The violence of the yen fall of roughly 20% reawakened fears of a wave of competitive devaluations.

Regulators are belatedly showing signs that they are thinking about potential market abuses from first principles. The broadening of the Libor investigations into the role played by interdealer brokers, a case against Nymex and two employees for divulging flow information and the pursuit of insider-trading allegations against employees of hedge fund SAC are all examples of regulators tackling potential abuse from the important principle that if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it may well be a duck.

The new CEO of Barclays takes on the role of chief slogan and acronym officer, and, unfortunately, RISES to the challenge by highlighting the bank's Purpose and Values, while ignoring how it will all work in practice.

The doubling of Lloyd Blankfein’s bonus for 2012 and the halving of Jamie Dimon’s payout was a sign of a return of the natural order of things on Wall Street. Goldman Sachs’s CEO Blankfein was rewarded for a year when the bank finally seemed to get its mojo back, while JPMorgan CEO Dimon was punished – fairly lightly – for his failure to deal with a monumental risk-management blunder in the form of the London Whale credit derivatives trading loss of over $6 billion.

Euromoney columnist Jon Macaskill takes a look at the year ahead when investment banks go back to the future.

The decision by UBS to perform elective surgery on its own investment bank can be partly attributed to pressure from bank-stock analysts. It might be premature to hail the dawning of a new age of the analysts, but a group who had become best known for astonishingly inaccurate stock forecasts and fawning attitudes to bank CEOs has at least begun to redeem itself.

Long-suffering shareholders of UBS can take comfort that JPMorgan’s bank-stock analyst Kian Abouhossein feels their pain. Abouhossein, who is consistently at or near the top of industry rankings of bank analysts, has been an owner of UBS shares while he has touted UBS as his number-one bank-stock pick in recent years and produced price forecasts well above the prevailing market value.

Goldman Sachs insiders were relieved by the dearth of damning allegations in Greg Smith’s tell-all book about his time at the firm.

Greg Smith’s memoir about his career at Goldman Sachs could have been subtitled ‘The curious incident of the dog that didn’t bark’.

The business of selling out your employer for a cash reward is still in its infancy. But the slow grinding of the wheels of regulatory justice is throwing up increasing numbers of employees who are providing evidence against employers to dodge or mitigate punishment.

The award of $104 million to UBS tax whistle-blower Bradley Birkenfeld in September showed that there is still good money to be made in banking. It just may come in the future from turning in your former colleagues and bosses to the authorities.