“If you look at the Chinese financial system, you look at shadow banking, you look at the amount of leverage, you look at how desperately they worked to keep the stock market up. It looks worse to me than 2007 in the U.S,” Ackman said.
.. Mary Erdoes, chief executive officer of JPMorgan Asset Management, said at the event that China’s equities markets don’t reflect the economy.
“It’s been 25 years of 7 percent growth,” said Erdoes. “No other country has displayed that. Not even the U.S. There’s a lot going on in the economy and it’s completely disassociated with the stock market.”
Deutsche Bank’s Latest Capital Raising Won’t End Its Problems
Deutsche Bank has long been something of a basket case. In 2007, when the first signs of the impending financial crisis began to appear, it was the most highly leveraged bank in Europe, with assets 68 times its Tier 1 capital. It narrowly managed to avoid sovereign bailout in the financial crisis, but it was a principal beneficiary of the US government’s bailout of AIG and it receivedliquidity support from the Fed and the ECB. But its problems weren’t limited to US subprime and toxic derivatives. The Icelandic journalist Sigrún Davíðsdóttir reports that Deutsche Bank had lent extensively to Icelandic banks and was left with the toxic loans when the Icelandic banks failed.
.. Deutsche Bank also turned out to have sizeable interests in Ireland’s teetering banks. When the Irish property market collapsed, the Irish government – partly at the EU’s insistence – bailed out its banks to prevent a chain of contagion spreading out across the Eurozone and risking the solvency of the large European banks such as Deutsche Bank.
.. The ECB’s Securities Markets Program helped Deutsche Bank and others unload their toxic Greek debt (and other dodgy sovereign debt) at better than market rates. Guess who holds it now? Yes, the ECB does – and the ECB is of course backed by taxpayers. Yet another disguised bailout for Deutsche Bank.
.. To me, Deutsche Bank looks very much like the archetypal “too big to fail” zombie bank – draining money from central banks, sovereigns and investors while giving little in the way of returns.
.. Though admittedly it is far from being the only European bank in this condition.
The Bloomberg terminal: clunky, costly, addictive, ubiquitous
Some of the more popular are known only by the keystrokes users have to enter on the terminal to access the functions: DINE and FLY allow financiers to quickly check out local eateries and flights, the former vetted and reviewed by like-minded, price-insensitive colleagues and rivals. But POSH offers perhaps the most telling insight into the world of finance.
The function is a high-end classifieds site exclusive to Bloomberg terminal users, where bankers and hedge fund managers can buy and sell sports cars, condos or holiday homes in Gstaad. On a typical day recently, POSH advertised a $2.75m condo in New York’s Chelsea neighbourhood, an apartment in Mallorca and a rare $20,000 Rolex watch.
.. “Most of the functionality is the same and the macro-data is much better [on the Eikon]. But everyone loves IB, particularly on the buyside [institutional investors],” he says. “So if we want to have good, quick access to our existing and potential clients, it is very difficult not to go with Bloomberg.”
.. when it emerged in 2013 that Bloomberg’s newswire reporters could monitor some aspects of their clients’ terminal usage. Goldman Sachs has spearheaded Wall Street’s development of a new chat system known as Symphony, which it and other banks and asset managers hope will lessen Bloomberg’s grip.
Hillary Clinton Offers Her Vision of a ‘Fairness Economy’ to Close the Income Gap
In the end, Mrs. Clinton did forcefully denounce fraud and manipulation of currency in the financial sector and said there could be “no justification or tolerance for this kind of criminal behavior,” language that some of her top Wall Street backers had been told of in advance.