North America

Equity capital markets bankers are having to get more creative with their advice to flotation candidates as the US government shutdown drags on.

Companies waiting to complete securities offerings while Washington remains deadlocked have few options – and more risk.

US bank taps European market for €1 billion deal.

Greenfield start-ups embedded within the core business might be the best way for banks to address their legacy infrastructure problem.

The deadline looms for SEC-regulated investors to report on the liquidity of individual bond positions, but the more pressing question is the accuracy of fund valuations.

With new voting FOMC members queuing up to proclaim their reluctance to raise rates further, it only remains to be seen how flexible the Fed will be on balance-sheet reduction.

When a plan comes together, there is a danger that complacency can creep in at any bank.

Management is confident that its long-term positioning will serve shareholders well.

Like most of its big US peers, Citi had a strong run in 2018

Goldman aims to grow in consumer banking and corporate cash management.

With asset prices high, RBC has made a virtue of a focus on the organic build of its footprint, with tech as important as ever.

The bank has gone from strength to strength and its tech firepower makes it hard to dislodge.

Collapsing equity and credit markets have little to do with a coming recession, but show a high and worrying correlation to the disappearance of the central bank bid.

To bring about fundamental change and to find long-lasting solutions, isn’t always pretty and it is certainly not always a win-win in the financial sense.

By under-investing the vast funds raised at big expense to their end clients and then delivering shrinking returns, private equity sponsors are prompting customers to demand new approaches.

The US market is due a shakeout as recession looms.

Investors continue to shy away from currency-hedged ETFs despite their positive short- and medium-term performance.

Frequent issuers on both sides of the Atlantic are exploring new ways to concentrate their high-quality liabilities into fewer more-liquid bonds to avoid paying a premium as markets sell off.

The damage done to mid-cap equities coverage by unbundling research is ever harder to ignore. It will not be easy to lower this self-imposed barrier to improved capital-markets access for fast-growing businesses in Europe.

Analysts believe Virtu Financial’s acquisition of ITG is largely a positive development for customers of both firms and the wider FX market, despite lingering concerns over access to institutional customer data.

Investors' sudden obsession with whether or not a flattening yield curve heralds a recession is a distraction from more profound concerns about the state of financial markets.

CLSNet – a new payments netting service for FX trades – aims to reduce costs and increase liquidity for market participants.

UniCredit’s €3 billion deal is a harsh demonstration of market dynamics.

The Trump administration has begun the process of ostracizing Iranian finance. Bankers there are hanging on to some rare good news, but how long will it be till they are back to square one?

The role of quantitative traders in the FX market is becoming ever more significant, as the amount of business executed via algorithms continues to increase.

Over the last two years, Bank of America has been overhauling its low-to-moderate income business, redesigning branches and products, improving employee retention and working with community partners, but will the bank get the credit its actions deserve?

The amount of dry powder that private equity firms now have means they are sometimes putting even more than 50% equity into deals – it’s a huge cushion that is contributing to reckless lending behaviour in the debt markets. But are lenders taking too much comfort from a buffer that could rapidly disappear?

A string of jumbo strategic corporate deals made 2018 one of the busiest years ever in M&A, but falling equity markets, slowing economies, rising debt costs and geopolitical uncertainties have now dimmed the outlook severely. M&A bankers hope that private equity buyers, with $1 trillion of equity to put to work, will pick up the baton and that activist investors will stop corporate executives from quietly jamming those takeover and disposal plans back into the freezer.

Jon ‘Mystic Mac’ Macaskill looks ahead at possible highlights for markets in 2019.

Thirty-year mortgages on houses in cyclone, wildfire, flood and drought zones? Systemic risk is building.