While You Were Working - February 27 - SmartBrief

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While You Were Working – February 27

Paging Senator Warren, LSE head fakes Deutsche Boerse, AIG's conga line of CEOs

3 min read

Modern Money

AIG_2

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

How do you say “Heads Up!” in German?

News that the proposed merger between Deutsche Boerse and the London Stock Exchange appears doomed broke over the weekend. However, one behind-the-scenes nugget of information that is no longer behind-the-scenes is that when the leadership of LSE informed Brussels that they did not intend to meet a key antitrust demand, they did so without first notifying their counterparts at Deutsche Boerse. The kerfuffle is about demands from EU authorities that LSE divest its stake in Italian bond trading platform MTS. According to the FT, Deutsche Boerse leaders thought the demand would be easy to meet and wouldn’t scuttle the deal. Now they know – a wee bit late – that LSE’s brain trust thinks otherwise.

The most thankless job on Wall Street just got more thankless

The board of directors of Tim Geithner’s favorite ATM machine is not happy with the man current leading AIG. The Wall Street Journal reports that the AIG board is considering letting go of the troubled firm’s current CEO, Peter Hancock. Should the board dump Hancock, it will undertake a search for the 4th CEO of AIG since the crisis. Hancock, who followed in the footsteps of Bob Benmosche and Ed Liddy, apparently hasn’t done a good enough job of completing the turnaround of AIG. It makes one wonder: Maybe if AIG hadn’t paid out all those crisis-era swaps at 100 cents on the dollar, the ensuing conga line of CEOs wouldn’t have had so far to go to turn it around.

Chinese companies look abroad for more funds

Led by banks and property developers, corprations in China have thus far in 2017 tapped international markets to sell more bonds than domestic markets. While viewed as only a temporary break from the long trend, it indicates select Chinese firms might be strategically enjoying the ability to tap the vastly different foreign and domestic markets.

Paging Senator Warren

This Bloomberg piece outlines the looming fight between Wall Street and private equity firms over a proposal by GOP lawmakers to eliminate interest deductions for companies operating overseas. That is all fine and dandy as any fight that pits banks and insurers agaisnt private equity will like spark some fireworks. However, what I find fascinating is that the GOP proposal literally says “special rules” will be created for financial services firms. Wow. It seems like a proposal with wording like that is just begging for a special kind of scathing attention from a certain senator from Massachusetts.