Last we were informed about US government’s decision to rescue Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Both mortgage lenders are under special regulatory supervision now, the so called conservatorship. This event can be described in two sentences, but there are some major implications. We have found the following data that illustrate the size of this public […]

The subprime crisis of us-American mortgages (and its primary and secondary impacts on the financial system) has increased the pressure for mergers and acquisitions in the European financial services market. In particular in Germany major transactions are likely to occur: Postbank and Citibank are on Sale. Some Federal State banks (former Sachsen LB and West […]

The international financial crisis claimed another victim among German banks this week. It was the specialised mortgage and public sector lender Duesseldorfer Hypothekenbank (Duess Hyp). “The small German bank’s owners have temporarily transferred ownership to the BdB’s depositor guarantee fund, after which it will be sold to a third party.”  The bank is fairly small […]

Security and liquidity are important issues in bond market. Now the financial crisis and the general uncertainty (due to the subprime crisis) have an impact in the market for covered bonds (so called Pfandbrief). Dealings of them have come to rest.
In regular times securities traders generate their income from turnover – the more the merrier. […]

In this post I will describe the first steps and approaches of (small to medium size) German retail banks when organizing their strategic planning process. Some of these aspects are valid for all types of small to medium size companies; at least they offer the option to compare your strategic planning process with the banks’ […]

So far I have resisted the wish to comment about the ongoing sub-prime and financial crisis on this blog. I surely have an opinion about all this. However, so much has been written in this matter – analyses, comments, reports, more analyses, readers comment etc. I agree with many of them and disagree with others. […]

There are bad news from the financial sector wherever you look these days. Here are just two headlines from the last couple of days:

Worldwide financial job losses triple in 2007 – Almost 200,000 staff are laid off (FT, 18 January 2008)
Crisis talks for West LB – about one third of the current staff (of 5,900 […]

A couple of days ago (see this post) I had assumed that the financial reports of the fourth quarter would present new cumulative value adjustments. Yesterday Citigroup announced its financial results. Due to writedowns of $ 18.1 billion in the business segments subprime mortgage and increased losses in the segment consumer loans the loss is […]

Due to the so called subprime crisis a large number of banks had to make heavy cumulative value adjustments in the third quarter 2007. The ultimate cause for this crisis was credit default related problems with sub-prime loans for house financing (mortgages) in the US.

New stresses and strains seem to be occurring for the fourth […]

As we know from several studies and own observations strategic planning can be a very hard business. In the literature a large number of ideas are available; some of them are very helpful. Others might be appropriate for a specific industry or even a specific organization. Sometimes it can be helpful to look beyond one’s […]