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from Felix Salmon:
Jamie Dimon needs a boss
Jamie Dimon is wagging his finger from newstands across America this week, above the kind of headline his PR team can only dream of: "DIMON IS FOREVER: Why Jamie Dimon is Wall Street's Indispensable Man".
The story itself, by Nick Summers and Max Abelson, consists mainly of rich corporate insider types talking about how wonderful Jamie Dimon is, and how ridiculous it is that anybody might consider stripping him of the chairmanship of JP Morgan. Here's a doozy:
Admiring rivals have been known to call Dimon “the sun god.” That cosmic aura has real use, says Kathryn Wylde, who served on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s board with Dimon until his term ended last year. “There’s no doubt that it helped the bank, because so much of that business is built on confidence.” The intrusion of shareholders, in the form of a vote on Dimon’s dual roles, she adds, is “indefensible if the company is performing well.”
Wylde is one of those great-and-good people who turn up on boards all over the place: not only the New York Fed, but also everything from the NYC Economic Development Corporation and the Manhattan Institute to the Lutheran Medical Center and the US Trust Advisory Committee. Her day job is serving as the president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, a partnership made up exclusively of large companies and the rich people who lead them. JPMorgan is unshockingly among them. Her view of the role of shareholders in corporate governance is fascinating: it's "indefensible" for them to care about such things so long as they're getting paid.
from Felix Salmon:
The silliness of valuing hedge funds
How do you value a hedge fund? It's impossible, really. You can see how much it earned in any given year, but past performance is a very bad guide to future results. In any case, all future income is reliant on both the investors and the managers sticking around, which means that the value of a hedge fund to its managers is always going to be higher than the value of a hedge fund to an outside investor with little ability to keep the managers in place.
Partly as a result, almost nobody buys and sells stakes in hedge funds as an investment. (As Peter Lattman recalls, Anthony Scaramucci tried to do that, and failed, before he became a fund-of-funds manager.) Indeed, there are precious few hedge funds where such stakes are even traded. If you want exposure to a certain manager's alpha-generating abilities, then you're better off just investing with her and paying 2-and-20.
from Felix Salmon:
The IIF implodes
There's a lot of money and power at the nexus of banking and policymaking, home of the infamous revolving door and the natural habitat of people like Mike Froman, America's new trade representative, who has shuttled back and forth between government and Citigroup and who, behind the scenes, helped pick all of Barack Obama's initial economic team. And wherever there's money and power, you're sure to find turmoil. If Promontory is the big winner these days, there's also bound to be a big loser. Let me introduce you to the IIF.
The Institute for International Finance describes itself as being "the most influential global association of financial institutions" -- where by "influential" it means that it aspires to have the ability to persuade policymakers what to do. For most of its existence it was run by Charles Dallara, a former Treasury official who spent two years at JP Morgan before becoming head of the IIF in 1993. He stayed in that job for 20 years; in 2011, the last year we have numbers for, he was paid $3,955,381 for his efforts. That's 20% of the IIF's total payroll; the other 104 employees, between them, took home a slightly more modest, but still impressive, average of $153,870 each.
from The Great Debate:
The dark side of bank dividends
In April, U.S. banks dusted off the dividend again, a trick they’d mostly abandoned during the financial crisis. JPMorgan Chase plans an 8-cent-per-share hike. Wells Fargo’s will be 5 cents. Same for Morgan Stanley. Bank of America will raise its dividend a penny. Some might celebrate the move: The banks are back! But there’s more to it. In this fairly anemic economy, dividends are yet another strategic, if counterintuitive, hedge that won’t get our loved and loathed financial institutions lending again anytime soon.
Although good news for shareholders, the payouts don't mask the reality that banks are still unstable. Executives are scared of looming regulatory schemes, such as the Brown-Vitter bill in the Senate, that could raise equity requirements to cushion the excessive debt of borrowing-prone banks. While earnings are up, balance sheets are deceptive. The big banks still rely heavily on income from the stock market, which overall has been stronger, and take in about $83 billion in subsidies. Their equity and cash reserves are a tiny fraction of their debt.
from Breakingviews:
It’s about good governance, not Jamie
By Rob Cox
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Another day, another pressure point for JPMorgan. The latest rebuke of the U.S. bank’s board arrived on Tuesday from proxy adviser Glass Lewis, which like Institutional Shareholder Services helps investors make up their minds about how to vote at the annual meetings of companies. Both firms are now arguing for JPMorgan to split the roles of chairman and chief executive.
from Felix Salmon:
The invidious “down payment requirement” meme
I feared this would happen. Peter Eavis has a column today about what his headline calls "Down Payment Rules". Here's his lede:
It seemed an easy fix to prevent the excesses of the housing market: make home buyers put more money down.
from MacroScope:
Europe’s ‘democratic deficit’ evident in Cyprus bailout arrangement
The problem of a “democratic deficit” that might arise from the process of European integration has always been high on policymakers’ minds. The term even has its own Wikipedia entry.
As Cypriots waited patiently in line for banks to reopen after being shuttered for two weeks, the issue was brought to light with particular clarity, since the country’s bailout is widely seen as being imposed on it by richer, more powerful states, particularly Germany.
from Edward Hadas:
Banker-think in welcome retreat
For once, investors have got it right. In 2008, their panic turned a financial crisis into a long multinational recession, but they have mostly yawned right through the drama in Nicosia. They hardly twitched at a stream of warnings from investment banks and pundits: bank deposits are no longer sacrosanct; the European Union has been exposed as despotic and incompetent; the Russians are coming; the Russians are going; capital controls will destroy everything; “bail in” (taking losses on loans that cannot be repaid) is the end of the world as we once knew it.
Such talk was out of proportion. Cyprus is a small country - its GDP would put it at 116 on the Fortune 500 list of the largest quoted U.S. companies - with a financial sector that had expanded excessively for two decades, almost entirely by attracting flight capital from Russia. A national financial collapse was both insignificant and merited. Besides, the EU and the International Monetary Fund had a plan to deal with the collapse: a combination of financial help from other countries and managed pain for depositors in Cypriot banks.
from Breakingviews:
Review: Seeing through bankers’ woolly thinking
By George Hay
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
How much capital do banks need? Ask the Basel Committee of global banking supervisors, and it will recommend 3 percent of total bank assets. Ask tougher observers like the UK’s banking commission, and you’ll hear 4 percent. But ask Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig, the economists behind The Bankers’ New Clothes, and you’re in for a shock: they’re after 30 percent.
from MacroScope:
Is Slovenia the next shoe to drop?
The Cypriot saga has thrown the spotlight on Slovenia, which is also a small euro zone country struggling with an over-burdened banking sector.
Slovenia's mostly state-owned banks are nursing some 7 billion euros of bad loans, equal to about 20 percent of GDP, underpinning persistent speculation that the country might have to follow other vulnerable euro zone countries in seeking a bailout.
