After its skillful communication the day following an embarrassing trading debacle, Knight Capital Group has gone quiet. That’s odd, because the firm seems to have stabilized itself, with news reports saying it secured fresh financing and dealers resumed routing trade orders to the firm. But without more communication from Knight, speculation about its future is […]
Responding to a sudden trading loss is never easy, but Knight Capital Group deserves high marks for handling the turmoil around a technology error that disrupted equity markets and produced heavy losses for the firm.
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.
In the wake of the Libor-rigging scandal, U.S. regulators are looking at how a key benchmark rate in the $3 trillion U.S. municipal bond market is determined. Maybe regulators read the RiskMatters blog?
Remember Ed Breen? No? He took over a well known company after it was rocked by scandal, pilloried by Congressmen and editorial writers and later had its senior executives sent to jail. He adopted a radical strategy and engineered a brilliant turnaround. It’s a lesson for banks today.
One of the serious misjudgments by Barclays CEO Bob Diamond in the Libor scandal was his belief that regulators’ praise for the bank’s cooperation during the investigation would shield it from criticism. It did not. Diamond should have learned from Ken Lewis that you can’t count on regulators’ goodwill to protect you when things get […]
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, […]
On Monday, Barclays CEO Bob Diamond sent a letter to employees that he hoped would draw a line under the widening scandal over the bank’s manipulation of a key lending rate. But rather than relieve the pressure, the letter only increased it, and by Tuesday Diamond had resigned. His letter offers several lessons for scandal-scarred […]
John Thain, the CEO of CIT Group, recently was honored by a Manhattan charity and had some interesting things to say about public perceptions of the financial sector.