Despite the rumours, top Spanish Bank Santander -Eurozone’s 2nd largest by market cap- will indeed complete this year the merger of its asset management fund (Santander AM) with Pioneer Investments, Italian UniCredit’s subsidiary, once the operation meets the regulatory and legal requirements. A EUR5.3 bn deal that has been simmering for more than 20 months.
At end-2015, Spanish banks and savings banks had barely a quarter of the holding in Spanish companies’ shares it had in 1992, the first year in the historical series elaborated by BME’s Rearch Department. The current share of 3.6% is 12 percentage points lower than that in 1992 and 5.8 percentage points below the level in 2007, at the start of the global financial crisis.
James Alexander via Historinhas | Brexit is an irrelevance. So say US equities. In fact, if US equities say anything, they seem to think Brexit is a good thing if it means the Fed holds off from rate rises for longer. Bring it on!
AXA IM | Is the future for fixed income one of flat and negative yield curves? That is certainly the direction of travel as central bank buying, lowered growth and inflation expectations and a lower for longer interest rate outlook all contribute to reduced term premium and hoarding of safe haven assets.
BARCLAYS | While in large parts descriptive, Tecnicas’s recent analyst day highlighted the controls that the company has in place, the shock to the system as proved to be sub-optimal in Canada and the efforts put in place to ensure that these don’t repeat.
Spain is one of the countries in the EU where its big businessmen remain in their posts the longest. Despite the fact that Emilio Botin is gone and Alierta and Villar Mir have left, the average age of Spain’s top businessmen is still higher than in France (56.6 years), the US (58.8 years) and the UK (55.8 years).
After the lack of success of private initiatives to help restructure Italy’s banking system, the government is now looking at how it can directly step in and help out the banks. Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS) is one of Italy’s biggest banks and the one which has the largest amount of toxic assets on its balance sheet by a long shot. At the end of the first quarter, MPS’ exposure to toxic assets was over 47 billion euros.
What’s going on with technology giant Google, and other similar firms like Amazon or Apple, is really scandalous. The company with headquarters in Mountain Valley, and now called Alphabet, posted spectacular pretax profits of 19.651 billion dollars (26% of its income of 75 billion). But it hardly paid any tax abroad.
Deutsche Bank is still betting on the Spanish property market and has bought €400 million in doubtful property developer loans from Bankia. The deal was carried out by the German bank’s funds, which could have paid around 150 million euros for the assets.
AXA IM | Despite some recovery in risk assets at the start of this week, the net reaction since the result of the UK referendum on membership of the European Union (EU) has been lower government bond yields and wider credit spreads in fixed income markets. This creates an interesting situation for investors looking at short duration funds.