UK
Company: Standard & Poors
The job creation potential as hedge funds fill the lending void
If more hedge funds step up to provide direct lending to European businesses there’s likely to be a healthy amount of recruitment opportunities, including for those with private equity expertise. The potential for hedge funds to start lending directly to SMEs was highlighted recently by Standard & Poors (via Financial News). In Europe, it’s still [...]
And what won’t be as hot in 2010?
Even though 2010 will hopefully be as good as the best bits of 2009, not everything will be quite as zesty as last year. Some things may even be worse. Here’s what we expect to deteriorate over the next 12 months: 1) Fixed income, currencies and commodities While commodities are still likely to be hot [...]
Hottish job: Sovereign risk analysis
With CDS spreads on sovereign debt widening, Spain downgraded to AA+ by Standard & Poors and fears that the UK may be next in line, people with experience of analyzing sovereign default risk look set to become suddenly popular. A senior strategist in the frequent borrower group at one European bank says sovereign risk is [...]
Who got dinged in 2008?
2008 was a cold year to be a banker: for all the warm spots in financial services last year, there were multiple icy ones. It was most freezing in the vicinity of: 1. Lehman and Bear Stearns Suffice to say, neither institution still exists. After their demise, around 6,000 out of 14,000 Bear Stearns bankers [...]
Trader exodus could compound Lehman’s woes
It’s turning out to be a very, very bad week for Lehman Brothers. The Wall Street Journal predicts it’s about to announce a quarterly loss of more than $300m and will need to raise $3-4bn in new capital following failed hedges. Lots of people have gone very short on its stock. And Standard & Poors [...]
Who’ll do the job of ratings agencies?
Named, shamed and blamed, ratings agencies are looking a little ragged around the edges. Investors themselves may need to hire people to calculate credit risks in future. With triple A no longer a water-tight guarantee of a leak-free investment, ratings agencies could find themselves squeezed as investors take a more proactive role in analysing just [...]
Collateralized debt obligations (CDO)
What are they? CDO is a name that was broadly applied to all kinds of assets (mortgages included) that were securitized and then divided up into different levels (‘tranches’) of risk and sold on to investors. To understand what a CDO is, you first need to understand the process by which one comes about. Investment [...]
AIG
What is it? American International Group (AIG) is/was an insurance company of truly epic proportions. With $1.06 trillion in assets, 2007 revenues of $110bn and a profit of $6.2bn, it is/was involved in everything from selling life assurance to insuring office buildings and insuring against default on structured derivative products like credit default swaps (CDS). [...]
Hedge funds: global trends
After an unprecedented six months of losses, hedge fund performance to the end of November this year was -18.5%, according to Hedge Fund Research, which was the sour cherry on top of a torrid 2008. So what, you might ask, considering that last year was grim for just about every area of financial services, what [...]
Bradford & Bingley
What is it? Bradford & Bingley (B&B) was formed from the happy union of two building societies in 1964. It’s been based in the Yorkshire town of Bingley for over 100 years, and became a bank in 2000 after the former Bradford & Bingley building society floated on the stock exchange. When it was a [...]
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