January 2014
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LATEST ARTICLES
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Euromoney’s annual Asia company ranking is based on a survey of market analysts at leading banks and research institutes in Asia.
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Pony Ma has built a Chinese internet company that competes on a global scale. It is no wonder that analysts rate it and its management so highly.
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"When you have so much money, you can buy everything. But you cannot buy the French justice system. You will have to submit to its rules. The budget of the French justice system is less than the sum diverted by Mr Ablyazov from the Russian Federation alone."
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What is the truth about Mukhtar Ablyazov? Is the former head of Kazakh bank BTA a fraudster on a par with Madoff and Stanford, as prosecutors from Russia and Ukraine to England and France claim? Or is he the persecuted victim of his home country’s political elite? One thing is for sure: the hunt for Ablyazov, and billions of dollars in assets he is alleged to have illegally appropriated, is one of the great sagas of our time.
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The development of the cerrado into arable land will benefit Brazil far more than its oil discoveries.
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Africa’s growth is one tribute to the former president’s legacy.
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Asia Pacific’s moribund M&A market needs promised reforms in China to be effected as soon as possible.
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The country faces many problems in banking, real estate, consumption and demographics that cannot be quickly solved.
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Fed tapering will prompt rises in yields for African hard-currency debt, but this doesn’t mean that countries with strong economic fundamentals should hold off issuing.
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Regulatory pressures mean private banking is less and less lucrative; the bigger players will benefit.
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"What’s the future for dealer-to-client platforms? They’re going to go the same way as dealer chatrooms"
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Allegations against RBS’s treatment of struggling small and medium-sized enterprises have once again cast a harsh light on banks’ treatment of these companies. While banks deal with zombie borrowers and tout loans at fat margins to stellar SME credits that don’t want them, it is SMEs in the middle ground that need more help.
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Transport costs have made the country’s agriculture industry uncompetitive. But new infrastructure projects should transform the opportunities some have seen in land values.
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EBRD suggests bad-banks solution; Could help recapitalize weakest lenders
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US claims that Germany’s external surpluses are hindering global recovery are inaccurate and unjustified
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Internationals take a majority of Energa; IPO slides in secondary market
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China drives capital markets; Convertible bond issues stage a return
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Fiscal slippage, less FDI and lower export prices make Ghana among most vulnerable; Eurobond access still cheap
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Small and medium-sized enterprises are meant to be the machine that drives Europe’s growth-free markets to recovery. But each country’s environment for SME funding remains even more disparate than their economies.
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BNP Paribas beats Italian and Spanish banks for; Rabobank Polish unit; Commits to third-biggest bank in Ukraine
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VTB’s chief executive likens his role in Russian banking to that of a surgeon in a state-owned clinic. He’s certainly carved out a strong position in corporate and investment banking. He insists he can operate successfully in Russia’s new state-controlled capitalism, while resisting political pressure. Can he make what critics call his ‘grandiose scheme’ for VTB work?
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New financial services law on the way; Will constrain bank profits
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Foreign buyers are attracted by news of an export-led recovery and privatizations. Getting them hitched for the long term, however, will require a boost in local macroeconomic demand, including dealing with banks’ residual bad debts.
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A flurry of strategic sales by western investors and private equity firms kept corporate financiers busy last year. But these deals mask a problem: while financing is plentiful, sellers can’t bring themselves to be realistic on pricing.
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In 2008, Kuwait’s Gulf Bank was near death. Propped up by the state, it underwent repair and a refocus under a new CEO, Michel Accad. Job done, Accad is leaving. Analysts are on the alert for new strategies that undermine his good work.
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Russian and western firms have shovelled millions into investment banks in Russia. Although their ranks are much diminished, they remain dug in: doggedly hopeful, despite little chance of a change in their prospects.
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Concerns for mid-tier banks as AQR looms; Likely that additional provisioning needed
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If convention becomes the rule, then the long, boozy business lunch in banking and financial markets reached outlaw status some time ago.
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Asia’s new wealth is illiquid and no great source of profit; Consolidation inevitable among private banks
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Will Paul Volcker, author of the rule that has banned banks from proprietary trading, now stand up, perhaps beside Gary Gensler, recently departed head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and lambast banks for not trading enough?
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EP chair presses on with regulatory proposals; seeks parliament’s oversight of ECB.
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Capital inflow down; Brazilian investor outflow up; Increasing cooperation between Brazilian and foreign asset managers
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Disappointing end-2013 performance; McKinsey analysis predicts long-term issuance growth
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In one of the many rather surreal consequences of the financial crisis, banks are taking advantage of the QE-driven chase for yield among investors to sell off the very assets that caused all the chaos in the first place. The latest example of this is the public auction by the Dutch state of part of the ING Illiquid Assets Back-up Facility (IABF) that was put in place in 2009.
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Investment strategists seem convinced that the euro crisis is over and European equities will outperform in 2014 as growth returns. There are clear and present dangers to this cosy consensus view and the banks are still at the heart of the problem.
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M&A looks set to grow in Europe; Citi hopes to build on a breakthrough year
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Monoline wrap for pool of SME risk; firms pay up for five-year tenor.
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€31 billion AT1 needs to be issued by end-2014; Benchmark inclusion key to future appetite
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Friday 13th is not normally a day when you’d do anything risky. But this December, in London, it was decreed to be ‘Wear your Christmas jumper to work day’.
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Given I am writing this column in December just before the magazine closes for Christmas – I have been pondering what presents I would give certain bank chief executives.
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We like a bit of Christmas spirit as much as the next guy: tequila and bourbon being particular favourites. But the Euromoney office’s latest Christmas card haul left us slightly underwhelmed and, in some cases, just plain confused.
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The Financial Times recently ran a video on its website about the power of hair.
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As the World Cup shapes up to be the main sporting event of 2014, Euromoney columnist Jon Macaskill looks at comparisons between investment banks and football teams for clues to competitive match-ups in the year ahead.
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Anyway, back to Switzerland and the Swiss banks. Things do appear to be stabilizing at UBS. Sergio Ermotti was appointed chief executive in late 2011 and a year later he installed the long-term Merrill Lynch banker Andrea Orcel as head of UBS’s investment bank. UBS underwent an epiphany and scaled its fixed-income division back drastically. The new focus was to be wealth management and corporate finance, which would hopefully flourish untainted by scandals in the fixed-income division. However, in the third quarter of 2013, UBS suffered a setback. The bank announced that it would delay, by at least a year, its aim to reach a 15% group return-on-equity target. This retreat was due to an unexpected demand from the Swiss regulator, Finma, requiring UBS to set aside more capital against "known and unknown litigation".
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It was a dank, dark autumn morning. My alarm shrilled and I stumbled into the kitchen to brew a pitch-black espresso. On auto-pilot, I reached over and switched on CNBC. Someone was lamenting the most recent "disappointing" set of Credit Suisse earnings. "Same old, same old," I thought to myself as I grumpily switched off the television.
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I was interested that the renowned banker James Leigh-Pemberton, who used to head Credit Suisse’s UK operations, left the bank late last year to become chairman designate of UK Financial Investments, the British government unit that manages the taxpayer shareholdings in Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland.
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Someone else who also recently stepped down is Sir Hector Sants, the former head of compliance at Barclays. Sants, a one-time Credit Suisse banker, ran the wholesale division of the British regulatory authority, the Financial Services Authority, from 2004 to 2007. He was then promoted to run the whole organization, which he did until the FSA was dismantled in the middle of 2012.
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European equities have caught up with historical valuations; now they need earnings-related growth.
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The spectrum of indicator evidence points to a rally through the first quarter of 2014. But the outlook could worsen if valuations start to look stretched as the year’s second quarter approaches.
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Will 2014 be 1987 all over again? As the equity rally enters its fifth year, parallels are inevitable. But while a short-lived cyclical bear market could happen this year, the secular outlook is likely to remain bullish.
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The renminbi’s impressive rise this year as a global trade finance currency is a positive development for a critical market that has been buffeted hard in recent years by limp demand and financial regulation.
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The investigation by the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), uncovering alleged flaws in the sovereign-ratings process, could presage a more intrusive supervisory regime, rekindling the debate about their role in global financial markets.
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The rationale for a higher benchmark is clear but regulators must clarify its role, alongside a risk-based capital regime, to reduce distortions and save the securities-financing market from a liquidity crisis.
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Euromoney Country RiskIdentifying countries ripe for an investment-grade rating is a complicated task, with the main rating agencies differing in their assessments of credit risk. Euromoney’s Country Risk Survey highlights several borrowers with bright prospects, having successfully predicted the shift from junk status to investment grade for the Philippines earlier this year.