When BlackRock Inc. completed its initial public offering in 1999, it fell a bit flat. There was no first day pop; Founder and Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink didn’t even get to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Valued at just under $900 million, the firm was one of 30 large investment-managers in the US, managing $165 billion of assets.
For all the talk of a soft landing in the US, there’s one corner of the economy where the hazard lights are flashing: the $1.6 trillion motor-vehicle lending market, which accounts for around a quarter of non-mortgage consumer credit. For the past three years, bad debts have been rising.
There’s a reason so few hedge fund firms seek a stock market listing: Investors don’t like them. The allure of an economic interest in these money machines is tempered by the risks. First, there’s key-person risk. Many such firms are dominated by a single executive.
Although big by absolute standards, PNC and its closest peers haven’t reached the optimal size to extract such economies of scale and, without acquisitions, they risk falling short of the requisite tipping point.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. reports earnings on Friday, and Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon is bound to have some choice words about the state of his industry when he sits on a call with investors at 8:30 a.m.
There are many ways a bank can lose money. Top of the list are credit and financial market losses but beneath, there’s a whole taxonomy of issues that industry insiders brand “operational risk.” These result from bad internal processes, people and systems or from external events.
The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine and The Economist have all piled on, questioning Solomon’s performance in his day job as chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
Cynics often say about hedge funds are a compensation scheme masquerading as an asset class. If the critics are looking for ammunition to make their case, they need to look no further than Sculptor Capital Management Inc., the firm formerly known as Och-Ziff Capital Management.
Dial into any bank earnings call these days and you will hear lots of talk about “deposit beta.” The phrase came up 29 times in the presentations following results from four of the largest US banks last week. A metric that analysts have tracked for years has hit the mainstream.
Open up BlackRock Inc.’s annual report and – in case you didn’t know – the company tells you what it does. “BlackRock provides a broad range of investment management and technology services to institutional and retail clients worldwide,” it states.
Problems occur when a market shift reduces investment opportunities after a period when investor capital has been scaled up. The current climate portends such a shift.
Almost 30 years on, the great bond massacre of 1994 still looms over Wall Street. So when Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell pitches 1994 as the model of what he’s trying to achieve in this interest-rate cycle, it’s enough to cause shivers on trading floors. “In three episodes,” he observed in a recent speech, “in 1965, 1984, and 1994 – the Fed raised the federal funds rate significantly in response to perceived overheating without precipitating a recession.”
Hedge funds have long been criticized for underperforming the bull market in stocks for the past decade. But as markets get more challenging and interest rates climb, it’s their risk-management skills – not their performance record – that could underpin an upturn in the industry’s fortunes.