Fees ain’t what they used to be
The US stock market has bounced this morning on Vikram Pandit’s bullishness about how the first two months of the year went at Citi.
Justin Fox notes that it could be an indication of banks getting back to decent profitability in their core lending business, which had been increasingly used as a loss leader for fees (such as those charged for packaging and distributing collateralised debt obligations). Read more
Investment insight and romantic gullibility
The trial of Helg Sgarbi, the Swiss banker-playboy-blackmailer, is intriguing for all sorts of reasons, including the fact that it produces sentences such as the one quoted in my post below.
The thing that strikes me is the dichotomy between the recklessness of Susanne Klatten, Germany’s richest woman, in an affair of the heart and her insight and restraint in investment matters. Read more
Quotes of the day
“I’m going to need to learn about merchant banking again and they are going to have to learn to have some old idiot like me who actually asks what they are doing.”
- Johann Rupert, the 58-year-old South African billionaire who has invested in the former Lehman Brothers private equity business. Read more
| About this blog | Blog guide |
John Gapper is an associate editor and the chief business commentator of the FT.
He has worked for the FT since 1987, covering labour relations, banking and the media. He is co-author, with Nicholas Denton, of 'All That Glitters', an account of the collapse of Barings in 1995.
Andrew Hill is an associate editor and the management editor of the FT. He is a former City editor, financial editor, comment and analysis editor, New York bureau chief, foreign news editor and correspondent in Brussels and Milan.
Latest columns by John and Andrew