October, 2018

• 24 October

  Overseas private bankers in China walk a fine line

  Risk and return go together, as any good investment manager will tell you. That’s the dilemma facing overseas private bankers serving China: Household wealth of $29 trillion presents an unmissable opportunity, but the hazards of tapping it may also be unusually high. Banks including Julius Baer Group Ltd. and Citigroup Inc. have told relationship managers to delay or reconsider travel ...

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• 24 October

  Europe’s fiscal demands of Italy are justified

  The European Commission has rejected Italy’s budget for flouting Europe’s fiscal rules, and has given Rome three weeks to try again. It’s the first time this has been done, and the move is risky because it sets up a political confrontation that could end badly. But the rules are there for a reason, and if the system is to work, ...

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• 24 October

  Big tech IPOs look like the buildup to a bubble

  

  A few years ago, with funding for startups surging, some people worried that the US was in the midst of a new technology bubble. Calmer heads realised that even if venture capitalists were being a little too carefree with their cash, the result probably wouldn’t look anything like the dot-com bubble and crash of 2000. Price-to-earnings multiples for public tech ...

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• 24 October

  Fintech ‘predator’ might just end up as roadkill

  

  France’s Ingenico Group SA straddles two fintech worlds: An old-school one of credit card payment terminals, and a shiny new one of all-digital financial transactions. The company’s expensive attempts to focus on the latter have helped knock about a quarter off its share price this year, while upstarts like Adyen NV have soared. The decline in Ingenico’s value has opened ...

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• 24 October

  Twitter’s misguided barriers to academic research

  

  Last month, Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, told the Senate Intelligence Committee he believes “the people use Twitter as they would a public square and they often have the same expectations that they would have of any public space.” But for all his vows of openness, the platform is making it increasingly difficult and expensive for academics to access tweets ...

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• 24 October

  Deutsche Bank turnaround plans cannot win investors

  

  Bloomberg After multiple turnaround plans and promises to restore growth, Deutsche Bank AG investors are no longer buying the talk. The German lender — already the worst-performing major bank stock in Europe this year — hovered near a record low on Wednesday after Chief Executive Officer Christian Sewing conceded that cuts to the investment bank are having a deeper impact ...

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• 24 October

  Barclays trading surge bolsters CEO in activist clash

  

  Bloomberg Barclays Plc’s Jes Staley has a stronger case to fend off the British lender’s activist shareholder as he delivers on a promise to grow its securities trading business. The unit saw fixed income, currency and commodities income substantially outperform US peers in the third quarter, rising almost 10 percent. Equity trading revenue surged by more than a third, the ...

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• 24 October

  ECB mulls how to set rates in future

  

  Bloomberg The European Central Bank is starting to consider whether the financial crisis changed forever the way it controls interest rates. A decade of pumping cash into the financial system put so much downward pressure on market rates that all policy makers can do is set a floor — the minus 0.4 percent they impose for holding banks’ deposits overnight. ...

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• 24 October

  Riksbank says it may need to hike rates ‘soon’

  Bloomberg Sweden’s central bank said it may soon need to raise interest rates for the first time in seven years if the pace of growth in Scandinavia’s biggest economy continues to support inflation. The Riksbank stuck to its earlier guidance, which gave policy makers a window from December until February to deliver a 25 basis-point rate increase. The bank kept ...

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• 24 October

  Carney as Brexit weapon shows BOE’s political role

  

  Bloomberg The Bank of England is getting dragged deeper into politics. Governor Mark Carney is getting it from all sides. He’s frequently lambasted by pro-Brexit lawmakers for outlining his economic views on the nation’s departure from the European Union, and in the past month another set of lawmakers has lined him up to assess any deal reached by the UK ...

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