After years of passivity and inaction, the SEC launched a ban on naked short selling of selected financial stocks over a weekend. Compare this to the decades it sat by and let a handful of credit rating agencies enjoy oligopolistic profits as the sole official guardians of investment grading. Now the SEC chairman, Christopher Cox, [...]
Filed under: Credit Crunch, Technology, regulation | Comments Off
Killing time with a corporate M&A lawyer over the weekend, the ritual trawl for a subject of mutual interest threw up the topic of Virtual Data Rooms, on which we carried a feature in the June issue. He wasn’t a big fan, having used them several times.
The point of VDRs is that teams of corporate [...]
Filed under: Technology | Comments Off
Back in September 2004 when VMWare launched in one of the market’s hottest IPOs since the tech crash, I asked how the company could achieve such high values in a market where Microsoft looked fully capable of launching its own products, especially after it had acquired Softricity.
Last week VMWare dumped Diane Green, the company’s co-founder [...]
Filed under: Technology | Comments Off
American politicians were hitting the Sunday morning talk shows assuring the public that Freddie and Fannie, the big government-backed mortgage finance companies, were in fine shape. So it didn’t surprise anyone, did it, when the Monday papers announced new measures to provide them stronger backing from the US Treasury. Are news crews staking out the [...]
Filed under: Technology | Comments Off
When I saw this morning’s news that the feds have dropped their criminal investigation into Apple’s options grants, I clicked onto FakeSteve. Nothing, despite some hilarious advice to Steve on how to get along in prison from friends like Martha Stewart, DeShaundre X, Ted Kacznski when the criminal investigation first broke.
So naturally I wanted to [...]
Filed under: Technology | Comments Off
It’s a lot to be proud of, this independent capitalist system that tells the government to get lost.
Except when it doesn’t.
Headlines yesterday were Fed Chair Ben Bernanke saying the bank will extend its lending facility for investment banks for another couple of months if needed. The Fed is also working with the SEC on improving [...]
Filed under: Credit Crunch, Technology, regulation, risk | Comments Off
Ah ha! Credit rating agencies seem to have been up to no good. There’s a big surprise. In the US, the SEC issued the findings of a 10-month report which found all three agencies – Moody’s Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings had “sacrificed quality for profit” as the Journal headline put it.
The report included [...]
Filed under: Technology | Comments Off
In a recent report entitled SEPA: Banks are building it, but will customers come?, Celent analyst Enrico Camarinelli writes that the level of Sepa attention by corporate users is “very little, almost nonexistent.” He adds that the mandatory requirements of IFRS and Sarbanes-Oxley have put Sepa low on the corporate “to-do list.”
Yet the crucial role [...]
Filed under: Payments, Technology, regulation | Comments Off
A survey-based study presented this week by Deloitte in Paris has some interesting revelations about banks’ attitudes to MiFID, which the consultancy divided into two main categories: the pro-MiFID and the merely “MiFID-compliant”. You guessed it, the former are a lot more proactive than the latter.
But more interestingly, Deloitte found that it was retail, full-service [...]
Filed under: MiFID, Retail Banking, Technology, regulation | Comments Off
BNP Paribas held its Innovation Days in Paris at the end of June, an annual event during which the bank’s various units and technology partners display and discuss their latest innovative initiatives. This usually purely internal event was open to reporters for the first time, with genial chief executive Baudouin Prot himself giving a tour [...]
Filed under: Technology | Comments Off
