earnings

  • 29 Apr 2013 at 4:14 PM
  • Banks

Deutsche Bank Goes Back To Improving Its Balance Sheet In The Traditional Ways

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I’m beginning to get the hang of how Deutsche Bank works, which seems to be:

  • When they lose money, that strengthens their capital position, and
  • When they make money, that weakens their capital position, requiring them to sell shares.

Maybe? Three months ago we talked about how … well, I said “Deutsche Bank Improved Its Balance Sheet By Losing A Lot Of Money,” which I guess seemed funnier at the time, but to be fair (1) Bloomberg said “Deutsche Bank ‘took pain’ in the quarter by booking a loss to boost its capital ratio without selling shares,” which is about equally funny or unfunny, and (2) Deutsche did in fact have a 4Q loss of €2.2bn and yet increased its Tier 1 capital ratio by 90bps.

Today, on the other hand, Deutsche pre-announced – good! positive! €1.7bn! – first-quarter earnings and also:

The Management Board of Deutsche Bank AG resolved today, with the approval of the Supervisory Board, to execute a capital increase, which is intended to raise gross proceeds of approximately EUR 2.8 billion. The purpose of the capital increase is to strengthen the equity capitalisation of the bank. Read more »

  • 18 Apr 2013 at 2:17 PM

Morgan Stanley Slowly Approaching Its Goal Of Becoming Boring

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So Morgan Stanley announced earnings today and people are sad because FICC trading wasn’t so hot. Asset management and wealth management are okay though? Anyway here’s a guy:

“The fixed-income rebuild hasn’t worked as well as they had hoped,” David Trone, an analyst with JMP Securities LLC in New York, said in a Bloomberg Radio interview. “They want to be more of an asset-gathering institution that also does investment banking and a little bit of trading. They’re not yet really to the point where they’ve convinced all of us what they are yet.”

One way to think about Morgan Stanley is that it’s a big room full of people who invest (or, trade with) other people’s money.1 That money finds its way into Morgan Stanley’s hands in different ways, and those ways change (slowly) over time. Some of it comes from individual investors whose wealth Morgan Stanley Global Wealth Management manages, globally. Some of it is from mutual funds and institutional assets managed by Morgan Stanley Asset Management. Some of it is from shareholders. Some of it is bank deposits. Quite a bit of it is repo and whatnot.

Here’s the mix of where it comes from over the past few years:2

This is pretty unscientific, and Morgan Stanley’s ability and desire to do stuff with its repo funding differs from its ability and desire to do stuff with non-fee-earning client cash. Still you can see some trends there I guess? Read more »

Goldman Had A Quarter

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Honestly bank earnings week has been a little boring, no? It’s been quarters since anyone announced a six billion dollar trading loss, and the recent news is pretty much modest beats from a diverse mix of businesses and where is the fun in that I ask you. Financial-market memories are short and … have negative serial correlation, or something … which might explain why Goldman is down today despite announcing a $4.29 EPS vs. analysts’ $3.87, with strength in principal investments and debt underwriting making up for so-so FICC revenues.

The call: variations on boring. Goldman CFO Harvey Schwartz painted a picture of Goldman clients who are deterred from strategic activity by macro uncertainty – “oh we can’t do that merger, because, uh, Cyprus” – and so spend their time refinancing their loans every six months to get lower interest rates.1 I suppose their bankers have to make fees somehow. And there don’t seem to be many conclusions to draw from the numbers: FICC revenues are down because there is noise in FICC revenues, not due to any change in business mix or performance. VaR is down because market vols are down, not because of any change in risk appetite. Private equity gains in investing & lending reflect stronger public equity markets because private equity is just beta. I guess.

Nor is Harvey your go-to guy to fulminate about regulation, though these days really no one is. He said various nice things about how the regulators are working hard and getting it right, and how Goldman doesn’t act in anticipation of regulations but only responds to them when they’re final. Others have phrased this less charitably. Thus Goldman’s new BDC is not a preemptive effort to fit prop traders into the Volcker Rule, but just a client-driven part of Goldman’s asset management strategy – “deploying our competencies into opportunities we feel like our clients would benefit from.”

So what’s left? There’s comp, of course: comp accruals were 43% of revenue ($4.34bn), versus 44% in 1Q2012 ($4.38bn), and headcount is down 1%. Analysts tried to push Schwartz to extrapolate a trend there, but again he mostly resisted. Keep enough people to serve clients, etc. Read more »

  • 12 Apr 2013 at 2:48 PM
  • Banks

J.P. Morgan Isn’t Doing This For Fun You Know

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Yesterday JPMorgan research released a 328 page report arguing that global tier 1 investment banks were “un-investable,” and today JPMorgan reported record first-quarter earnings of $1.59 per share versus $1.40 consensus, so I guess it sort of looks like there’s a disconnect. But not really? Here are the analysts on banking regulation:

We believe Tier I IBs are un-investable at the moment and the right time to make a switch into Tier I IBs would be if we get more clarity on regulations providing us comfort around the ROE potential of Tier I IBs or we see IBs having to spin-off their businesses leading to capital return to shareholders. We believe Tier I IBs will continue to remain more exposed to the IB regulatory changes as they try to “defend their turf” while Tier II IBs have the option to step back more aggressively.

Jamie Dimon, meanwhile, responded to analyst questions this morning by more or less begging the analysts themselves to call their congresspeople and defend JPMorgan’s turf, arguing that banks are safer than ever, that JPMorgan’s size and scale and universality provides services that clients want and is good for the world, and that “I hope at one point we declare victory and stop eating our young.”1

The analyst report is a fascinating bit of business. The claim is that global investment banking – by which they mean of course FICC trading – will see market share move toward top-tier banks, driven mainly by the commoditization of the FICC business with clearing and greater price transparency around derivatives, as well as higher capital requirements and more complex and Balkanized regulation around trading activities. The result: Read more »

  • 20 Mar 2013 at 7:03 PM

Deutsche Bank May Have Underestimated How Litigious People Are About The Whole Mortgage Catastrophe Thing

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Remember Deutsche Bank’s rather poor earnings report a couple of months ago? Well, it turns out that things have gotten worse, because people and regulators continue to sue Frankfurt’s most downtrodden bank. Read more »

  • 31 Jan 2013 at 2:04 PM
  • Banks

Deutsche Bank Improved Its Balance Sheet By Losing A Lot Of Money

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Bank earnings season is always a little surreal, I guess because there’s an inherent surrealism about banking. Deutsche Bank reported earnings today,1 and those earnings had an up-is-down quality that Bloomberg’s summary captured in this amazing sentence:2

Deutsche Bank AG, Europe’s biggest bank by assets, exceeded a goal for raising capital levels as co-Chief Executive Officer Anshu Jain focused on bolstering the firm’s finances rather than limiting losses.

So there’s one way of running a business where you bolster your finances by making money. And then there is global banking. Here is another, possibly even more astonishing line from the same article:

Deutsche Bank “took pain” in the quarter by booking a loss to boost its capital ratio without selling shares, Jain said.

Booking a loss to boost its capital ratio. Losing money, in the regular universe, should reduce your capital: capital is mostly retained earnings. Everything here is backwards.

Here is how Deutsche Bank boosted its capital ratios without (1) raising capital from the market or (2) making money: Read more »

  • 18 Jan 2013 at 12:06 PM

Citi CEO Knows This Idea Sounds Crazy But Just Hear Him Out, Okay?

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Back in October when Mike Corbat was dragged from bed in the middle of the night to take over the top job at Citigroup after Vikram Pandit’s ouster, he did a hastily assembled damage-control conference call while still wearing his footie pajamas. On this call CLSA analyst Mike Mayo surprised Corbat by asking him a softball interview question, namely: tell me how you want your tenure as CEO to be measured in five years. Corbat’s response – and here I’m quoting from memory – was “Wait, I’m the CEO? Crap. Let me get back to you on that.”

Corbat may have forgotten that promise, but Mayo did not, and he asked the question again yesterday – on Corbat’s first earnings call as Citi CEO – and got in reply maybe the single best sentence a bank CEO has ever said:1

Mike Mayo – CLSA
And then for Mike, I asked this question when you first got the CEO job. If in five years from now you were to look back at your performance, what would you want to see to show that you were successful?

Mike Corbat – CEO
I think probably going back to your first line of questioning, we’ve got to get to a point where we stop destroying our shareholders’ capital. I would say that would certainly be at the top of the list, that we run a smart and efficient business that’s good at its allocation of its resources around its customer and client segments, that it’s continued to have the ability to lead in a company those clients around the world, that it served the social purpose. There’s several things in there.

This seems a little unfair! Read more »

  • 16 Jan 2013 at 5:54 PM

Goldman Welcomed New CFO With A Nice Earnings Beat

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If you read a lot of media coverage of Goldman Sachs earnings you get the sense that the most important number the firm reports is average compensation per employee, which this year was a nice oh-so-close-to-round $399,506. I CONCUR, of course.1 Also of interest is the comp ratio, which was only 39% this year, as less of the spoils of Goldman’s labors go to the people in the building doing the labors, and more go to the people providing the capital. Progress!

The analysts on the earnings call were not all that focused on comp, which I attribute to jealousy, but there were some exceptions. Like JPMorgan’s Kian Abouhossein, who pressed the Viniar/Schwartz CFO tag-team about expenses and headcount in Investing & Lending, playing an enjoyable guessing game with the twin CFOs about staffing levels in Investing & Lending:2

I mean, there are only few hundred — I assume there are only a few hundred people running in this division. I can’t believe there’s thousands of — I would be even surprised if it’s 1,000 people. So I’m just wondering why you’re having $2 billion to $3 billion of expenses. Is it interest expenses or is it something else? I just don’t understand why there’s such a big expense level.

Because the few hundred people are paid really well? Other? Dunno. You can guess why Schwiniar might have stalled here (and on a later question about I&L Basel III RWAs); the Investing & Lending business model has gotten some negative attention recently. The problem is basically that it does things like investing and lending, which almost violate the Volcker Rule, or would if it existed, which it doesn’t, yet.

Here is the FT’s Tracy Alloway on Goldman’s earnings: Read more »

  • 11 Jan 2013 at 1:32 PM
  • Banks

Wells Fargo Mostly Putting Deposits Into Gold Ingots These Days

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Bank earnings season kicked off today with Wells Fargo’s announcement, and since I have nothing really to say about Wells Fargo earnings I figured the least I could do was put up some charts instead. Not on earnings – they’re up! net interest margin is down! on balance, gnash your teeth a little! – but on what Wells Fargo is doing with all the money it’s got.

This seems like a popular question to ponder, since it’s got rather a lot of money. So today brings the Journal‘s vividly headlined “Wads of Cash Squeeze Bank Margins”, and earlier we had Frank Partnoy and Jesse Eisinger’s attempt to find out where Wells is hiding all its fraud. The main thing is:

  • Banks have lots of deposits because everybody’s scared of everything so they put their money in the bank.1
  • Banks aren’t making lots of loans for some reason, with the reason ranging from “banks are a bunch of scumbags” to “you’re all a bunch of deadbeats.”
  • So they have money left over.
  • So they put it somewhere.

A natural question is “where is the somewhere?” and here is where Wells puts it:

That’s just various bits as a percentage of total deposits. You can see loans have decreased as a percentage of deposits since the crisis; other risky-type assets – trading assets and available-for-sale corporate and mortgage bonds, etc. – have increased a bit but not enough to make up for that drop: Read more »

  • 25 Oct 2012 at 4:28 PM
  • Banks

Banking Boring Again Even At Credit Suisse

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One way to make a lot of money in banking is just to be really good at it. But this is not a very good way! There are lots of people who want to make a lot of money in banking, and all of them1 have at least considered the approach of “just be good at it,” so you have no real competitive edge if that’s your strategy. You need to be creative and think outside the box, as you might say, if you were not very good at banking, as the law of large numbers says you are not.

I love me some Credit Suisse; they think outside the box. Then they sell the box to themselves in a roundabout fashion that magically removes it from their balance sheet. So when I saw this

“As we continue to reduce costs, continue to optimize our capital and we continue to have momentum on the client side we think we will be able to improve our return on equity toward that 15 percent target,” Dougan said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “That’s something that’s achievable.”

I had so much hope! I mean, “reduce costs” is boring and sad, and “momentum on the client side” is just like “be good bankers” which whatever, but “optimize our capital” could mean all sorts of devious things.

It probably does but I couldn’t find them. I mean, other than the usual devious things, which start with “Basel II.5 core tier 1 ratio increased by 2.2 percentage points to 14.7%, total capital ratio increased by 1.0 percentage point to 21.2″ and segue right along into this funding stack: Read more »

  • 18 Oct 2012 at 1:15 PM
  • Banks

Morgan Stanley Now 23% Safer

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A value-at-risk model basically works like this. You have some stuff, which is worth X today. Tomorrow it will be worth X + Y, where Y ranges from more or less negative infinity to positive infinity. Y is a function of a bunch of correlated random variables, rates and credit and stock prices and general whatnot. You look at a distribution of moves in those variables and take (usually) a 2-standard deviation daily move; if 95% of the time rates move by -10 to +10 basis points, your VaR model will assume a -10bp or +10bp move, whichever is bad for you. You take the 95%-worst-case, taking into account correlation etc., and tot up how much you’d lose in that case. Then you write that number down and feel a bit better, since you’ve sort of implicitly replaced “we have $X today and will have some number between negative and positive infinity tomorrow” with “we have $X today and will have some number between ($X – VaR) and positive infinity tomorrow,” though of course the first statement is true but unhelpful and the second is not true and also unhelpful.

But that aside! You get your VaR from a distribution of your variables, but the obvious question is what distribution. A good answer would be like “the distribution of those variables over the next three months,” say, for quarterly reporting, but of course that is only a good answer because it begs the question; if you knew what would happen over the next three months you would, one assume, always end those three months with more than $X and this VaR thing would be moot or moot-ish.1

So instead you look at things that you think will allow you to predict that future distribution as accurately as possible, which is epistemically troubling since VaR is a measure of how inaccurate your predictions might turn out to be. Anyway! You pick a distribution of variables based on the sort of stuff that you always use to estimate future distributions in your future-distribution-estimating business, which could mean distributions implied by market prices (e.g. option implied vol) but which seems to mostly mean historical distributions. You look at the last N days of data and assume that the world will be similarly distributed in the following M days, because really what else is there to do.

Picking the number of days to use is hard because, one, this is in some strict sense a nonsense endeavor, but also two, the world changes over time, so looking back one year is for instance rather different from looking back four years. Here is how different: Read more »