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Cazenove lives it large in ECM
Thomson Reuters data on equity capital markets activity over the first 9 months of the year throws up some pretty exciting data if you are a Cazenove shareholder.
Top of the European league table by a country mile sits JP Morgan with $33.5 billion of deals. And that figure incorporates the ECM deals done by JPM’s UK subsidiary (50 percent plus a share) JP Morgan Cazenove. On its own JPM Caz was responsible for $24.2 billion of deals, making it top of the table by some distance. Its nearest rival was Morgan Stanley with $15.5 billion of deals.
This figure has particular resonance because of the possibility that JPM might buy out the Cazenove stake in JPM Caz.
$24.2 billion is a touch under 15 billion pounds. Underwriting fees are about 3.25 percent of value these days. Apply this to the figure and you get to about 480 million pounds. JPM Caz doesn’t get to keep all of this: it has to pay JPM for access to its balance sheet and share fees with other institutions when it sub-underwrites. There are also accountants and lawyers to pay.
Why the Gorman news isn’t big news
I’m still trying to figure out why much of the financial press seems to think the announcement that James Gorman will replace John Mack as CEO at Morgan Stanley is some shocking event. It would have been a big shock if Gorman didn’t get the job.
Sure, Morgan Stanley had to go through the obligatory search process. And there was always a chance someone other than Gorman would replace Mack.
Bye bye Mack
John Mack is making way for a changing of the guard at Morgan Stanley.
The Wall Street firm says Mack is stepping aside as CEO at year’s end to make way for James Gorman, long seen by many on Wall Street as Mack’s heir apparent.
Mack will remain as chairman.
The move is not surprising. The past year, of course, has been a grueling one for Mack and Morgan Stanley. But his energy level has been running on low and it’s clearly time for a new direction at the firm.
Wall Street is being judged
Capitol Hill has yet to get its act together on financial regulatory reform. But another arm of the federal government, the judiciary, is emerging as the new best friend of investors.
It started a few weeks ago when Judge Jed Rakoff refused to approve the Securities and Exchange Commission’s wimpy $33 settlement with Bank of America over the bank’s failure to come clean with shareholders about its acquisition of Merrill Lynch.
Songbird deal backs Canary Wharf
Nomura’s decision to move its Lehman staff from Canary Wharf to the City earlier this summer seemed a victory for London’s historic financial centre over its upstart rival.
However, the astonishing terms Nomura secured, combined with a recent rescue fund-raising for Songbird Estates, owner of much of Canary Wharf, show that the Docklands estate retains its pulling power.
(more…)
Morgan Stanley keeps Goldman from top M&A slot
Despite top billing for M&A involving European companies as well as Asia-Pacific and Japanese corporates, Goldman is not top of the league tables for global M&AÂ for the year to date.
Instead it is long-time rival Morgan Stanley leading the pack, capitalising on a sizeable advantage in deals involving U.S. companies. Goldman is in second place in the worldwide ranking and JP Morgan third.
Mack is no Blankfein, thankfully
John Mack is being pilloried by some on Wall Street for not being more like Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein, after Morgan Stanley reported a larger-than-expected second-quarter loss largely because of several onetime expenses.
But the “Be like Lloyd” rallying cry is mainly coming from traders with Twitter-like attention spans, who simply want Mack and Morgan Stanley to engage in the same kind of government-backed risk-taking that Blankfein’s Goldman Sachs is doing when it comes to proprietary trading.
from MediaFile:
Most teens find “tweeting” pointless — Morgan Stanley
Taking a break from flogging the latest tired media business model, Morgan Stanley published a short report on Friday entitled, "How Teenagers Consume Media" by 15-year-old summer intern Matthew Robson that offers a frank discussion of what young digital media consumers are up to. The FT has highlighted it on its front page, perhaps as an antidote to wall-to-wall coverage of the annual Sun Valley media moguls conference in recent days.
The most memorable moment in the report is its discussion of the irrelevancy of Twitter to teenagers:
Stop the Wall Street pay stories
OK. I know it’s probably too hard for an editor to resist running out another story on excessive Wall Street pay–especially on the day when you know the US government is going to release another set of ugly jobs numbers.
So it doesn’t really surprise me to see a story in The Wall Street Journal about “big pay packages” at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Populist outrage sells papers.
Beware the Tarp repayments
Shares of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are trading like the financial crisis never happened. In fact, Goldman’ stock is trading at price that’s right around where it was the Friday before Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy last September.
But it looks the rally may have gotten ahead of itself. Roger Freeman, a Barclays Capital analyst, is scaling back his second-quarter estimates for Goldman and Morgan–largely because of the cost to both firms of repaying money to the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
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The Wall
