Search results for

"I remember going into the Fed for meetings on the LTCM rescue plan. At one end of the table there was Jimmy Cayne, at the other Dick Fuld. Now the table is a lot smaller and the faces are not so familiar"

Have the big Japanese banks been over-cautious about buying stakes in troubled western peers?

Freddie Mac is seeking to reassure holders of its debt that the preferred stock purchase agreement announced by US Treasury secretary Henry Paulson will protect them, "regardless of who wins the elections".

It will have 10 million customers, which is roughly half of Australia’s population. Crucially, it will have Westpac’s AA rating, rather than St George’s A. At the time of the merger announcement, it was envisaged as having a combined market capitalization of A$66 billion ($477 billion), although an improvement in the St George share price since then had increased that figure at the time of writing.

Data provider Markit announced at the end of September that it was planning to offer free access to its daily CDS pricing data to non-clients for a limited time. It also announced that buy-side accounts that wanted to confirm index trades would be given free access to its RED (reference entity database) system – again for a limited time. This largesse follows Markit’s decision earlier this year to offer free access to RED for buy-siders that only trade lightly in the CDS market. The moves will be welcomed by the smaller, second-tier institutions involved in the CDS market that have struggled to get access to information following the credit events at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and WaMu.

The relaunch of FX futures by Ice finally provides the CME with some proper competition.

Emerging markets have driven global growth in recent years and are expected to continue to outpace the developed world as global growth slows.

White labelling and third-party provision have been a perennial red herring in cash management but the credit crunch might finally be the spur to them taking off. By depressing bank revenues and consequently putting pressure on technology budgets – often the first thing to be cut in tough times – banks will simply have to operate differently in order to stay in the market.

Cash management for financial institutions is broadly similar in terms of the kinds of products provided by banks to corporates. Moreover, product development is usually combined in a centralized group that takes input from both FIs and corporates so that new products generate maximum value, although, of course, some solutions are developed for different markets, albeit often using the same underlying technology.

Anybody throwing a superficial glance at Eric Daniels’ CV in June 2003 could have been forgiven for erroneously assuming that his appointment was a signal that Lloyds had tired of its conspicuous failure to tie up a merger with a European partner, having rediscovered an appetite for international expansion towards the end of the 1990s.

The Spanish central bank prevented its financial institutions from investing heavily in the US sub-prime related securities. But Spain’s mid-tier banks are heavily exposed to a local property sector in crisis. Can they ride out the downturn? Peter Koh reports.