Year in Numbers

Painful memories of the global financial crisis may still be fresh, but there is an almost tangible sense that the banking industry has finally got up the confidence to re-write the playbook. The world’s major banks have restructured and re-tooled. Marshalled by a tough new regulatory and supervisory regime, they have reduced risk-weighted assets, re-sized employee populations, rebalanced client portfolios, rebuilt product platforms, re-thought geographical footprints and redesigned IT, data management and other operational architectures....

The sale in June 2018 by the UK government of a 7.7% stake in Royal Bank of Scotland served as a stark reminder about how the fortunes of US and European banks have diverged since the financial crisis. The deal was highly symbolic for Europe’s capital markets bankers, not just because it resulted in a £2bn paper loss for the UK taxpayer a decade after RBS was bailed out, but because the investment banks selected by the UK government to handle the sale were all American. The RBS deal was just another opportunity for US banks to notch up...

The period since the global financial crisis has coincided with a time of heavy investment by Japanese financial institutions. Coming out of the upheaval of their own 1990s banking crisis and the economic torpor of the post-1990 period at home, Japan’s restructured and rejuvenated banks looked overseas for growth from an enviable position of strength. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group’s purchase of a 24.4% stake in Morgan Stanley and Nomura buying Lehman Brothers’ European and Asian businesses were the most high-profile examples of Japanese...

In September 2017, the then US Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen announced the great unwinding of the central bank’s 10-year stimulus programme. It would be as uneventful as “watching paint dry”, she said, with fingers crossed. European Central Bank president Mario Draghi followed suit in June this year, saying that he intended to reduce the monthly pace of asset purchases to €15bn until the end of December and then end purchases altogether. So what’s going to happen now? What does the new world of monetary policy, one in which two of the...

China’s role in the global economy is under intense scrutiny, thanks in no small part to the US president’s Twitter account. But while Donald Trump continues to rail against unfair competition, intellectual property theft and currency manipulation, China’s financial markets are finally opening up. “The theme of the opening up of China’s economy to the rest of the world has been talked about for decades, but the pace of change in the last 12 months has been remarkable,” said Julien Kasparian, head of securities services for Hong Kong at BNP...

To focus on simple issuance numbers when it comes to Green finance in 2018 would be to miss the real story. Yes, overall issuance was flat or a little down on 2017, reflecting the broader bond market environment (though European and euro currency issuance was up year-o- year, overcoming a drop in non-Green euro-denominated bond issuance). But, more to the point, 2018 saw Green finance extend its reach into new asset classes. In September alone, renewable electricity outfit Encavis launched the first Green Schuldschein (in a €50m deal), while...