Banking News

The UK Treasury was very pleased with itself yesterday. It had, it said, got an agreement from 11 foreign banks operating in the UK to fall in line with the UK's interpretation of the G20 restrictions on bonuses. Then the US banks started to reveal their US profits. Has Brown now undermined the only part of the UK economy that he was reliant upon to find the money to fix the economic hole he drove the UK into?

At last, The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the USA's guarantor of banking deposits, has some good news. Kind of. But it also raises a serious question as to the balance sheet values of many US banks.

French bank Societe Generale is to launch a rights issue to raise EUR4,800 million. But it's not going to have any money left over after the issue.

The USA's Federal Deposit Indemnity Corporation is in crisis. It's closed 95 banks so far this year and contributions from those that survive are not enough to cover what it's spent, much less what it is going to have to spend as more banks collapse.

HSBC has signalled that, for global financial services, the time zone to be in is GMT +8. What are the possible implications?

South Africa's Standard Bank moved into new offices in London's Gresham Street last week. This week it's done a deal to borrow USD1,000 million in Chinese money - with an interesting plan.

Fresh from, as he sees it, saving the world from economic collapse, UK PM Brown is now on a mission to save the financial world from large pay packets.

The UK's Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, told the Scottish CBI that those who thought the financial sector should be shrunk have got it wrong.

In recent months, the Singapore government has sold shares in both Bank of America and Barclays at well below the price it paid for them. Those holdings were via Temasek. But there were holdings in CitiGroup and UBS via another Singaporean fund: GIC. In May, those holdings were reported to be long term. On Friday, Singapore reportedly reconsidered its position in relation to UBS. Is this due to possible US government action?

Corus Bankshares, Inc., which through its wholly owned subsidiary Corus Bank, N.A., has filed notice with the SEC that it must delay reporting; now NASDAQ has served notice that its reports are overdue and if the position is not rectified, the ultimate sanction is de-listing. Its problems are symptomatic of the USA's small-mid-size banking sector.