The good news: UBS has figured out a way to save $2.5 billion annually moving forward. The less than good news: Continue reading »
Swiss
Just go with it for a sec.
Let me ask you people something. If you were going to protest UBS, how might you do it? Stand outside the building chanting “UBS sucks”? Rent a helicopter and dump millions of 10-4′s on the roof? Smear a bunch of melted Toblerone bars on your shoes and track that shit through the lobby? Sure, if you were an unimaginative fuck, I guess you’d probably go with any one of those. Not Bauer Klemenz Marti. This UBS client wanted to think bigger. And weirder. More outside the box. He wanted people to say “This guy is fit for a straight jacket, we better listen to him.” Which is why after several months of threats and promises to do something about the unsatisfactory way in which he felt his money was being managed, he finally did it. This morning, he tied his pet bull to one of the bank’s branches in Grenchen and stayed there until 5:00PM. To send a message. Continue reading »
The euro keeps diving to new lows and currency traders are hoping someone, (perhaps the Swiss) will step in to stop the bleeding.
Rumors that the Swiss will move to stabilize the currency have stemmed the tide for now. The euro dropped to $1.2176 against the dollar yesterday, a new low, but has bounced back to around $1.2342 in today’s trading. Continue reading »
As we reported to you last week, Bloomberg has now managed to sniff out the fact that UBS is slurping up private wealth management professionals for large signing bonuses (which may or may not have a draw component), even as they let the IB group die on the vine.
UBS AG, the Swiss bank under investigation for allegedly helping wealthy Americans evade taxes, hired more than 200 brokers in the U.S. in the fourth quarter as it sought to counter client defections.
UBS hired a team of five in Dallas from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. with $4 billion under management, and a group of the same number from Morgan Stanley in Houston with $2.1 billion in assets, Karina Byrne, a spokeswoman for the Zurich-based bank, said in an interview yesterday.
The largest Swiss bank lured employees by offering signing bonuses of as much as 260 percent of the revenue the brokers brought in over the previous 12 months, said two people with knowledge of the matter who declined to be identified. By contrast, Merrill Lynch & Co. brokers were offered up to 100 percent of the revenue they brought in to stay following the sale to Bank of America Corp.
“It was one of the more aggressive deals that we’ve ever seen in this industry,” said Rick Peterson, the president of Rick Peterson & Associates, a recruitment firm in Houston.
When it comes to hiring (and firing) practices, the Swiss have a downright passive aggressive streak. Of course, in this case, stuck behind the politically difficult prospect of paying IB and their ilk contractually required bonuses in this climate and pleading poverity while “investing in the future” which do you think they are picking?
We think this a good move by UBS (not the screw your employees part, the build for the future part). Certainly, the events of the last 6 months will create a lot of “high net worth churn” and UBS wants to be at the front of the line when things resurrect. Having correctly identified the massively leveraged balance sheet and securitization markets (both smack of IB) as a broken model, the new goal is access to assets and deposits and to capture them now, when they are cheap and in flux.
We’ll just see how that works out.
UBS Hired Brokers in U.S. With ‘Super-Sized’ Bonuses [Bloomberg]
The narrow ring of exclusivity draws smaller and smaller. Yes, there was our story earlier in the month about Goldman Sachs being an “iffy” enough trading partner to get a first tier scolding at the Pratts window, and now, apparently, UBS isn’t a decent enough counterparty to avoid a potential counterparty credit downgrade from S&P.
Even after an orgy of Swiss bank backstopping, the news would seem to suggest that the old Swiss slogan “Any port in a storm, Switzerland in a hurricane” needs replacing. (I never understood that phrase. Switzerland is landlocked and not subject to hurricanes. But I digress). Whatever the case, it’s clear Switzerland is going to need a new slogan. As usual, your suggestions are solicited. We came up with a few new ones to get your creative juices flowing. (Just clean the table off when you are done please, there’s Lysol in the kitchen).
1. Switzerland: Safer for Jews than Austria.
2. Switzerland: Come for the vaults, stay for the chocolate!
The best suggestion in comments gets an all expense paid trip for eight days and three nights to Zurich.*
UBS Counterparty Credit Ratings May Be Cut, S&P Says [Bloomberg]
*Yeah, but not really.
UBS has promised to stop helping its US customers get out of paying taxes but Senator Carl Levin (no relation) says that’s not good enough–he wants their Nazi-sympathizing asses shut down. Clearly it’s never going to happen though of course it would be more than a little hilarious if it did. Crazy Carl told ABC news today that he thinks Federal regulators should revoke UBS’s banking license because “…no bank that goes to the extent that UBS has gone through to avoid doing what their agreements with the United States require them to do, should be allowed to continue to do business unless they clean up their act.”
Though Levin said he was deeply disturbed by a list of “secrecy tricks” UBS bankers used to carry out their scams, including fake charitable trusts, disguised business trips, foreign credit cards and code names for clients (including Adolf’s Stache and The Senator From Michigan), he did give credit where credit was due, noting that he was very impressed by banker Bradley Brikenfeld’s out of the box thinking when it came to smuggling diamonds into the US for a client, by hiding them in an empty tooth paste container.
Sen. Levin: Shut Down Giant Swiss Bank UBS [ABC News]
When the Swiss are worried, you really need to watch it.
No lesser financial news giant than Forbes reports (via Thomson Financial News) that former Credit Suisse CEO Oswald Gruebel (a likelier name for the antagonist in a spy novel with a plotline involving stolen gold you have probably never encountered) quipped “We’ve narrowly escaped a system collapse. This has never happened before.” One is tempted immediately to think of World War II, the Great Depression, the Cuban Missile crisis, but this ignores the “system collapsiness” of these events from the Swiss View. To the Swiss these are but small tremors. Trifles.
So the next time someone tells you the sub-prime mess is overblown, or that Bear Stearns should have been allowed to fail, just point them to Oswald Gruebel, and remind them that the primary Swiss concern with World War II was that it increased shipping costs.
International Financial System Was Close To The Brink [Forbes]
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