…employees will get their bonus numbers when management feels like giving them their bonus numbers! Read more »
UBS
Separately, the bank also needs to hire a bunch of interns for this summer’s “Emerging Talent Program.” Enter: two birds, one stone: Read more »
Carsten Kengeter, who finds inspiration in interesting places, has left the building (and been replaced by a Bear Stearns alum). Read more »
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Banks
Credit Suisse And UBS Put Little Pieces Of Themselves In Their Compensation Plans
By Matt Levine
Swiss bank annual earnings are here so we might as well check in on what they’re up to with comp. You and I may think of comp in pretty straightforward ways – if you did good, and your employer did good, you get paid well, and if not not – but Credit Suisse and UBS take a delightfully arcane wheels-within-wheels approach, constantly changing how they pay employees to send signals, fine-tune incentives, and optimize regulatory capital. I suppose if I worked there I’d be so pleased by the complexity of the edifice that I’d be okay with otherwise disappointing pay. Current employees may disagree.
Anyway we talked about UBS the other day; per the FT they are handing out bonuses in the form of high-trigger CoCo bonds that get written down to zero if UBS’s regulatory capital falls below 7 percent. The bonds “will pay a market-based interest rate” though that’s not saying much; any interest rate is “market-based” in the sense that it can be decomposed into, like, Treasuries plus a number. Presumably the number here is high.
Credit Suisse’s entry is out today and it is a bit of a retreat from previous years’ glories; here’s how CS describes it in its financial report: Read more »
RBS’s Seating Arrangements Deprived The World Of Untold Embarrassing IM Conversations
By Matt Levine
It’s getting to be a struggle to be amused by Libor manipulation chats. RBS took its lumps today, and the CFTC and FSA orders are full of quotes, and you can read them in various round-ups, but, meh. Even Bart Chilton is bored; today’s imagery (“sends a signal to those who would monkey around with benchmark rates … much more than a slap on the wrist …”) is a letdown after his UBS masterpiece (“Financial sector violations are hurtling toward us like a spaceship moving through the stars”) just a few weeks ago. I get it! Everyone manipulated Libor! In writing! And then they were like “heh, fukin awexome man, u manipluated libor, gud work, i sexx u now, w champain.” Fabulous.1
Part of why RBS provides less delight than its predecessor Libor-settlers is that RBS made use of the oldest and most reliable way to avoid typos: not typing. From the CFTC order: Read more »
The Swiss bank will reportedly announce today that it’s going to be doing things a little differently around here re: compensation. One, deferrals will start at $250,000 and two, rather than being paid in UBS stock, the non-cash portion of 6,500 senior employees’ bonuses will come in the form of subordinated debt that can and will be wiped out in the event the amount of capital on hand falls below the level required by EU regulators, putting the onus on everyone to make sure no one pulls an Adoboli (and avoids multi-billion dollar fuck-ups in general). Half-Adobolis only moving forward, please. Read more »
Cuts are said to be going down in New York. Read more »
UBS Libor Manipulators Can Only Bow Down In Awe To Guy Who Submitted 66% Euribor Quote
By Matt Levine
Is it just obviously true that if (1) you had a Libor-based loan or swap or whatever, (2) Libor was intentionally manipulated by a bank or a scheming cabal of banks, and (3) that manipulation moved Libor against you and cost you money, then (4) you should be able to sue those banks to get back that money? Maybe? But then what do you do about this?
The preliminary analysis of individual quotes from panel banks shows that some anomalies can be found in the submissions, despite Thomson Reuters sanity checks. These anomalies can be seen as fat finger errors. For example on 12 June 2004, Bank 30 provided quotes between 44% and 55.5% for all tenors, and on 14 August 2006, the same bank provided quotes of 66% for a range of maturities (1 week to 3 weeks and 2 months to 5 months) as indicated in Chart 2.
That’s from the European Banking Authority – European Securities and Markets Authority report and recommendations on what to do about Euribor, a slightly less corrupt Continental analogue of Libor overseen by the European Banking Federation. Euribor was not, you’ll be pleased to know, 44% for any tenor on any date in 2004, but some of these fat finger errors do seem to have moved Euribor, though by mostly trivial amounts. Read more »
Losing Anything < $2 Billion, Whether Through Trading Or Regulatory Fines, Now Considered A Victory At UBS
By Bess Levin
UBS’s $1.5 billion settlement for manipulating interbank lending rates is the fourth separate regulatory finding against the Swiss group in as many years – underlining the failure of bank executives to reform the corporate culture…Just last month, a London jury convicted one of UBS’s former traders, Kweku Adoboli, of the biggest banking fraud in British history after he lost $2.3 billion in rogue trades. The FSA also fined the bank 29.7 million pounds ($39.2 million) for allowing the unauthorized trades. The trading loss is now seen among UBS staff as the new benchmark of wrongdoing, with reports of relief among employees that the bank’s $1.5 billion global Libor settlement was “only half an Adoboli.” [FT]
Kweku Adoboli’s Colleague Couldn’t Help But Admire The Cojones It Took To Lose UBS $2 Billion
By Bess Levin
Not everyone would have the balls, but Adobli did and for that he deserved props. Read more »
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Posted in:
Banks
Sometimes UBS Traders Manipulated Libor Just To Mess With Each Other
By Matt Levine
The last of the UBS Libor settlements to come out was the U.S. one and it has some of the best quotes. There’s the yen swaps trader who said “I live and die by these libors, even dream about them.” There’s … I mean, there is the life and career of Bart Chilton, in toto; here is a thing he said:
“A Conscience Isn’t Nonsense”
Statement of Commissioner Bart Chilton on UBS Settlement
December 19, 2012
Every so often, folks wonder if some in the financial sector believe that having a business conscience is nonsense. Financial sector violations are hurtling toward us like a spaceship moving through the stars. All too often, penalties have been a simple cost of doing business. That needs to change.
Particularly good are the exhibits to the criminal complaint against Tom Hayes and Roger Darin. We’ve previously met Hayes, cleverly disguised as Trader A; he was the senior yen swaps trader at UBS in Tokyo. Darin was the short-term rates trader “in Singapore, Tokyo, and Zurich,” though probably not all at once; he and his team submitted yen Libors for UBS. You can guess what happened when they got together!
But you don’t have to guess because there are lots of transcripts of their chats in the exhibits.1 Here is a problematic one: Read more »
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