Bankers miss Pru fees but eye AIA float June 1, 2010 LONDON bankers will miss the fees bonanza promised by Prudential’s swoop on AIA, but advisers in Asia are rubbing their hands at the prospect of a listing for AIG’s Far Eastern arm. Prudential was preparing to shower £850m on a raft of investment banks led by Credit Suisse, HSBC and JPMorgan, and lawyers led by [...]
PRUDENTIAL AND AIA EXPLAINED June 1, 2010 Q. WHY SHOULD PRUDENTIAL WITHDRAW NOW? A. Prudential – after suffering its first major setback with an unprecedented regulatory delay to the deal last month – was already facing growing shareholder discontent. A withdrawal today, after Prudential management meets top investors, would avoid taking the deal to a vote at a general meeting scheduled for [...]
Barnier ready to outline tough bank regulations June 1, 2010 THE European Commission is today expected to announce its intention to extend pay curbs in the financial sector and tighten control of credit rating agencies. Against a backdrop of growing frustration with sluggish progress in regulating a financial industry blamed for the crisis, the European Commission’s top officials will outline plans to reinvigorate momentum for [...]
Shopping around is the future of law June 1, 2010 COMMENTATORS talk excitedly about “Tesco Law” and the ongoing liberalisation of legal services as though it were a latter day gold rush led by big name supermarkets and banks. But what is it that consumers want? New research suggests that there is little enthusiasm on the part of the public to associate legal services with [...]
China delaying credit default swaps project May 31, 2010 CHINA has delayed a pilot project to trial credit default swaps (CDS) in its domestic bond market after the national banking regulator expressed concerns over their side-effects. CDS, derivatives that provide insurance against a bond defaulting, have been blamed for amplifying the financial crisis as their use spread from hedging credit portfolios to speculating. It [...]
Franco-German moves needed on short-selling, says regulator May 27, 2010 FRANCE’S financial watchdog yesterday called for urgent Franco-German initiatives to combat short-selling, a week after it slammed its neighbour for taking unilateral action to ban naked short-selling of some instruments. Jean-Pierre Jouyet, head of French financial markets regulator AMF, said he wanted to see better supervision of the market for credit default swaps (CDS), which [...]
AIG probe is abandoned May 23, 2010 The US Justice Department has dropped a probe of American International Group executives involving the credit default swaps that sent the insurer to the brink of bankruptcy and forced a huge taxpayer bailout, lawyers for the executives said. The criminal probe had focused on whether Joseph Cassano, who ran the financial products unit, and Andrew [...]
Markets face huge annual losses May 20, 2010 STOCK MARKETS worldwide plunged for the third consecutive day yesterday amid growing fears that the European chaos could lead to a financial collapse on the scale of the 2008 banking crisis. The FTSE 100 flirted briefly with the 5,000 point mark, eventually finishing the day down 1.7 per cent at 5073.13, while the French CAC [...]
CITY VIEWS: ARE YOU SPENDING MORE? May 20, 2010 DAVID KESBY | KESBY & COMPANY “I am spending more because business is better and I am more confident than I was a year ago when my business went through a dip. Although the retail index is up, consumer confidence is still wavering because there are still fears of a double dip.” DAVOR LALIC | [...]
MAN FROM THE PRU IN SPOT OF PULP FRICTION May 20, 2010 SEASONED investors will be familiar with the mountain of paperwork that traditionally accompanies any City deal, but it does rather take the biscuit when recipients are actually forced to order waste-disposal skips in order to get the documents off their hands. Yet this, ladies and gents, is the position which stockbroker Charles Stanley finds itself, [...]