Remember how David Einhorn got in trouble in England for insider trading on Punch Taverns stock and he was all “what?” and we were all “what?“? Well, you can judge it for yourself because now the entire disputed call with Punch is available online (at the back of this). So go read it, or read the highlights here. The FSA still thinks it’s insider trading, but the count of people confused by the whole thing is rising, and now includes the Merrill banker on the call. There’s lots of insider traderiness on this side of the pond today too so we should talk about that in a bit.
For now, though, two other things. One is quick – no one can resist one part of the call and I can’t either so here it is:
DAVID EINHORN: Hi, I’m sorry I didn’t get to see you when you were in New York.
PUNCH CEO: No, no, we — well, we’ve — we’ve only had the chance to speak once, although we have seen [reference to Greenlight Analyst] a few times since then.
DAVID EINHORN: Oh, you’re — you’re — you’re getting more than — than I could help with anyway. So, this is good.
PUNCH CEO: Okay. That’s fair enough. Well, one day we’ll get you around on a pub crawl around some English pubs.
DAVID EINHORN: Oh, that sounds fun.
PUNCH CEO: It is. You’re right.
English readers: Is it? I just assumed that Punch Taverns are rather grim places, like TGI Friday’s but with more … punching? … but maybe I’m totally off base here. Also, here is a hypothesis: vice investments do well because, for the same level of profitability, they get more analyst/investor coverage and enthusiasm. Wouldn’t you rather go on a pub crawl instead of like a tour of an auto parts factory in Queens? Would that influence your stock recommendations / money allocations? Someone should do a study. Continue reading »
I guess this is a thing? Today is the last day to submit comments on the Volcker Rule so hurry!* No less than Paul Volcker himself was roused from 25 years of slumber to submit his own comment, and while he was up he laid a gleeful smackdown on European governments. You may recall that some clients had some concerns about the Volcker Rule reducing liquidity, with some of those concerns being less sympathetic than others, and foreign sovereigns were among the noisiest complainers. Volcker is having exactly none of it:
There is a certain irony in what I read. In Europe, there are plans to introduce a financial transaction tax, justified in part by officials because it puts “sand in the wheels” of overly liquid, speculation-prone securities markets. … How often have we heard complaints by European governments about speculative trading in their securities, particularly when markets are under pressure?
So, ha, fair. There are other comments ranging from sort of what you’d expect from a guy calling himself Anonymous (“When are you people going to do what is right by your country? You destroy everything thousands of people fought and died for? How dare you counterfeit money for thieves, but NOT for suffering AMERICANS, Oh and for your WARS for PROFIT, prisons for PROFIT when we live in a FREE society??” etc.) to sort of what you’d expect from people calling themselves the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the American Bankers Association, the Financial Services Roundtable and the Clearing House Association (this one is 173 pages long and takes no explicit view on counterfeiting money for thieves though I’m going to guess they’re okay with it). Continue reading »
When people who hate banks and love homeowners are full of wild rage about this here mortgage settlement, and when people who love banks and hate homeowners are full of equal and opposite rage, that is pretty good evidence that the mortgage settlement is sort of meh and compromise-y and not that interesting, so let’s not talk about it. Oh, fine, let’s. You could go read all sorts of explanations and FAQs and diagrams and “top n things to know” (n = 3, 5) but I will give you a list of only one most important thing to know about it, which is that it will not reduce my mortgage so it’s all just noise. When will politicians start sticking up for me?
There is one sort of interesting thing that is probably most cogently explained here: Continue reading »
You may have heard that some shit is going down in Europe. This came as some surprise to me since I stopped paying attention to that whole continent when the banks were all fixed in December. What could possibly go wrong? I asked myself loudly, to drown out all the “Greece talks near [success / catastrophe]” I’d otherwise be hearing. Well, for one thing, some of those banks actually refused to be fixed just because they were, and I hope I’m representing their claims accurately here, “not broken”:
“The fact that we have never taken any money from the government has made us, from a reputation point of view, so attractive with so many clients in the world that we would be very reluctant to give that up,” said Josef Ackermann, Deutsche Bank’s chief executive, explaining to analysts last week why the German lender didn’t borrow from the ECB.
Mr. Ackermann said Deutsche Bank still is scarred from its experience borrowing from the Federal Reserve in the first phase of the financial crisis in 2008. U.S. regulators encouraged banks to borrow under the cloak of promised confidentiality, but when the banks’ identities were subsequently disclosed by the Fed, the recipients were dubbed bailout recipients. “We learned a lesson,” Mr. Ackermann said.
It’s a valuable lesson. While once government largesse was free and secret, we’ve recently seen all sorts of strings being attached to bailouts, from minor inconveniences like “if you take our bailout we’ll make you pay off (some of) your debts” to game-changing restrictions like “I don’t want my tax dollars to be used for some sort of pro-gay stunt like this.”* Continue reading »
What is the best thing about these Jefferies bonuses? For me it’s this:
For 2011, we offered our employees the option to receive the stock portion of their year-end compensation in the form of either shares or cash, with the cash amount being equal to 75% of the grant-date amount of the stock that an employee would otherwise receive. The election resulted in a decrease to share-based compensation expense of approximately $23.3 million, as certain employees elected to receive reduced cash awards lieu of the full grant-date amount of the shares. This offset increased cash compensation expense by approximately $17.5 million. The net effect of this election on total compensation and benefits expense was a reduction of approximately $5.8 million. While these cash awards were fully expensed in 2011, they will legally vest in future periods.
When I first skimmed the headline I thought, okay, paying a 25% discount for liquidity makes sense. I, anyway, would be a lot wealthier had I gotten … really almost any percentage of my stock-based comp in cash rather than vaporizing most of it and leaving a small stub subject to a nondisparagement agreement when I left (I love you guys!), but that is neither here nor there. Because that’s not actually what the Jeffererers got. The people taking the “cash” got no more liquidity or vestedness or, um, cash, than the people taking the shares. They got … at a first approximation, they got an illiquid JEF bond. If they’re around, and Jefferies is around, and the cash is around, in three years or whenever this stuff vests, then they get a fixed amount of money. If not, not.
So the only thing that the Jeffers got for giving up 25% of their stock-based comp was … avoiding the risk that Jefferies stock would decline by more than 25%. Here’s a silly coincidence: Continue reading »
I’ve been pretty skeptical of the whole Volcker Rule thing because I don’t really understand the conceptual division between “making bets with your own money” and “market making,” and I’ve been gratified to see that paid financial industry mouthpieces are on the same page. Now it’s nice to see unpaid mouthpieces agreeing too:
Yet finance ministers from around the world lined up to whisper in the ear of Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary, who made the rounds in Davos on Thursday and Friday, about a specific element of the Volcker Rule that has them apoplectic: The rule says that United States banks — and possibly certain foreign banks that do business in America — would be restricted in trading foreign government bonds. Yet the rule, conveniently, provides an exemption for United States government securities. Every other country is out of luck.
The measure, critics say, is likely to increase borrowing costs for foreign governments, reduce liquidity and make the market for foreign government bonds more volatile, the opponents charge. In the end, it may fall into the category of unintended consequences of a proposed new regulation.
So, yeah, totes agreed, but for diversity here is a more measured view:
The Volcker rule is, in many ways, a riddle wrapped in a mystery. It is impossible to know what the impact on market liquidity will be. Foreign banks, or non-banks, may step into the fray to pick up the slack… or perhaps the impact of the rule won’t be that big on US banks, anyway. Without a set of final rules, a period of time to watch them in action, and a parallel universe to see what would have happened if they hadn’t been implemented, it’s all speculation.
Again, I come down on the side of robust market-making by banks being a good thing and so I suspect those lined-up-and-whispering finance ministers are right, but it’s also true that that’s just, like, my opinion, man, and nobody really knows what will happen but if I were Citadel I’d be lobbying like crazy for the Volcker Rule and promising European governments that I’d make awesome tight markets in their bonds. Continue reading »
One reason that you’re in for seven lean years in the investment banking business is that bank capital requirements are going up due to Basel III, and “capital is expensive” in some loose sense, so banks will have less money to use to make loans and/or pay you. Some people think that this is mostly bull, because capital is not actually any more “expensive” than any other form of funding, though those people often actually don’t care that much about paying you so it may not be worth listening to them. In any case here is the abstract to an amusing new paper by Karlo Kauko of the Finnish central bank, because yes I make a point of being up to date on everything published by the Finnish central bank:
Bank managers often claim that equity is expensive relative to debt, which contradicts the Modigliani-Miller irrelevance theorem. … An opaque bank must signal its solvency by paying high and stable dividends in order to keep depositors tranquil. This signalling may require costly liquidations if the return on assets has been poor, but not paying the dividend might cause panic and trigger a run on the bank. The more equity has been issued, the more liquidations are needed during bad times to pay the expected dividend to each share.
Don’t worry if you don’t get that name dropping, it doesn’t matter. Also don’t worry too much about the paper itself, which is amusing but also sort of nuts.* The basic idea to come away with is that bank equity is where the bank puts all its hopes and dreams, and that, if banks are more or less reflections of hopes and dreams, the people who provide the real funding for the banks – repo counterparties and clearing banks and suchlike – are going to be inordinately influenced by reading equity tea leaves. Because what else are they going to read? Continue reading »
