A reader of the Financial Times this week might have felt momentarily transported back to the heady days before the financial crisis. For on its pages was a full-page ad in vivid color listing recent transactions completed by the busy bankers at Barclays. Such chest-thumping displays are rare among investment banks these days. Why would […]
Barclays chief executive Antony Jenkins announced his plan to transform the troubled UK bank. He gets high marks for communication, but the substance was a little thin.
Most banks work hard to say they’re different from the competition. But Barclays chief Antony Jenkins wants us to know his bank just like every other. It’s a clever communication strategy for deflecting attention from the bank’s woes. But what does he do after that?
With the awards season in full swing, we are pleased to present the 10 nominees for outstanding post from the Risk Matters blog over the past year. Enjoy!
The sinners continue to repent in the great Investment Banking Reformation. The latest penitent is Andrea Orcel, the head of investment banking at UBS, who appeared before Britain’s Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards and promised to ‘put integrity before profit.’ But it is brutal economics, not soul cleansing, that is changing UBS and other institutions.
The investment-banking reformation is picking up steam, with converts joining its ranks by the day. And like the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, it promises to be tumultuous and far-reaching, while leaving the promise of heaven just as uncertain.
Martin Wheatley of the UK’s Financial Services Authority on Friday announced plans to overhaul Libor, which has been at the center of a rate-fixing scandal involving Barclays and other major banks. Wheatley called for significant changes in the way Libor is set, and encouraged reform of other commonly used benchmarks with similar weaknesses – something […]
The Royal Bank of Scotland Group is reportedly in negotiations with regulators to settle charges the bank manipulated Libor. It would follow a similar settlement with Barclays just weeks ago, which ultimately led to the ouster of its CEO, Bob Diamond. But RBS chief executive Stephen Hester is no Bob Diamond.
Perhaps the only thing more surprising than the LIBOR rate-fixing scandal that engulfed Barclays last week is the method by which the rate is set. For more than four decades, the benchmark interest rate has been set by a group of banks, based on voluntary declarations of each bank’s borrowing cost, not actual trades. But […]
For the Barclays bankers who were fomenting a revolt to topple Bob Diamond earlier this week, the scene must have seemed eerily familiar. Most of them are veterans of Lehman Brothers, which Barclays acquired in 2008 following its collapse under Dick Fuld, the strong-willed executive who ran the firm for 14 years. Diamond, like Fuld, […]