Blackstone on UK bank trail January 24, 2010 AMERICAN investment group Blackstone is examining the possibility of entering the UK banking market, its chief executive Stephen Schwarzman said yesterday. Last week sources familiar with the matter said that Blackstone, one of the world’s leading buyout firms, had applied for a British banking licence and was working alongside fund manager Cambridge Place on a [...]
CITY MOVES | WHO’S SWITCHING JOBS January 18, 2010 Piper Jaffray The mid-market investment bank has poached Ian Wainwright from Canaccord Adams to join its corporate broking team as a principal. Wainwright has been a managing director at Canaccord since 2007, and was instrumental in building the firm’s life sciences franchise. Prior to that, he was in specialist biotech, medtech and pharma sales at [...]
Barclays buys New York market maker LaBrance in a $25m deal January 14, 2010 BARCLAYS is buying New York Stock Exchange market maker LaBranche for $25m (£15.3m). The move means the bank can strengthen its position as the biggest market maker on the index. The deal will also reduce the number of designated market makers (DMM) on the NYSE to just four with electronic systems becoming more widely used. [...]
Barclays buys NYSE market maker for $25m January 14, 2010 BARCLAYS has announced a $25m (£15.3m) deal for New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) market maker LaBranche & Co. The move means the UK bank can make even stronger its position as the biggest market maker on the index. The deal will also reduce the number of designated market makers on the NYSE to just four [...]
Aviva buys US equities house January 5, 2010 AVIVA Investors has bolted on a US equities operation through the takeover of River Road, a Kentucky-based boutique asset manager, for an undisclosed sum. The British insurer’s funds arm said the acquisition would complement its existing fixed income presence in the US and help it win more institutional mandates in North America. River Road has [...]
Giant Towers Watson listed January 3, 2010 TOWERS Watson begins trading as the world’s largest employee benefits consultancy today, pushing Mercer into second place. The firm, the fruit of a $4bn (£2.5bn) merger between Watson Wyatt and Towers Perrin, listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq this morning. In a statement, Towers Watson said it would issue $200m [...]
Abu Dhabi in Citi dispute December 16, 2009 CITIGROUP has vowed to fight an action brought by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), which claims the banking giant misled it over a $7.5bn (£4.6bn) investment. ADIA bought shares in 2007 for eight times the current price. The beleaguered bank had turned to the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund to replenish capital after seeing [...]
THE TIPSTER December 14, 2009 NEWS that British Airways’ cabin crew has voted in favour of strike action, combined with the state of the airline’s pension scheme has put further downward pressure on the airline’s share price. On a technical level, shares are currently blocked from any further progress by a resistance line in place on the daily chart since [...]
People don’t come here for the weather December 13, 2009 In 1733, Voltaire, one of France’s greatest thinkers, wrote a series of letters on the English nation, describing some of the extraordinary going-ons he had discovered during his exile to this country. The findings scandalised many of his French readers, then a truly statist and anti-capitalist nation. “Go into the London Stock Exchange – a [...]
WallStreet falls on recovery fears December 7, 2009 The S&P 500 and Nasdaq ended slightly lower yesterday and the Dow was flat, reversing earlier gains, after comments by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke sparked jitters about the economic recovery. Financial and technology shares were among the biggest drags on the market. The S&P lost 1.6 per cent while the KBW Bank Index shed [...]