Food and consumer products conglomerate Unilever’s making a big play for the Asian market with its $2.7 billion deal to buy Carver Korea, a South Korean-based skin care specialist....more
The headline a few days ago was the arrest of VW exec Oliver Schmidt during an ill-advised trip to Miami last week. But the DOJ also indicted five other top executives over their role in VW’s emissions cheating scandal. No...more
As anticipated, the Fed raised its benchmark interest yesterday (for only the second time since the 2008 financial crisis) to somewhere between .5 and .75 percent and, perhaps more critically, revealed its expectation for...more
Italy’s struggling lender Monte Dei Paschi is cutting jobs and closing branches in an effort to revive the world’s oldest bank (and maybe save Siena in the process)....more
The Journal gives us a closer look at Italy’s Monte dei Paschi—the world’s oldest bank (founded in 1472)—that’s deeply tied to Siena and that’s threatening to drag the whole of the region’s economy down with it if it fails,...more
Financial Industry Developments - CFTC Announces Measures to Enhance Protection of Customer Funds - On August 8, 2016, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced three separate enhancements...more
ValueAct Capital Mgmt, an activist investor, has taken a $1.1 billion stake in Morgan Stanley with 38 million shares that represent about 2% of shares outstanding. Unlike normal activists (at least for now), ValueAct took the...more
Talk about a regulation with teeth. Within days of the Treasury Department announcing new rules meant to discourage corporate tax inversion deals, Pfizer and Allergan announced they were scrapping their planned $152 billion...more
In what would be the largest acquisition of a foreign corporation ever, state-owned ChemChina is nearing a deal to purchase Switzerland’s Syngenta (besting US-based Monsanto’s overtures to do the same). The deal could help...more
Chinese economic data has already been wreaking havoc on markets in 2016. So I shudder to think about the impact of the recently announced investigation by China’s anticorruption commission into the head of the country’s...more
The Restructuring Mid-Summer Review: Europe and the Emerging Markets - For those focused on the debt restructuring market, the Greek sovereign crisis (covered extensively in our recent updates1) has drowned out news of...more
On July 14, 2015, Justice Friedman of the New York State Supreme Court for the County of New York granted in part Morgan Stanley & Co.’s motion to dismiss fraud claims brought by HSH Nordbank AG (“HSH”) and Carrera Capital...more
Steps Towards a Capital Markets Union - The European Commission is consulting on a blueprint for creating a harmonized capital market across the EU, to facilitate capital raising in the EU while maintaining consumer and...more