Cap Markets

The student lending giant offered forecasts of future earnings that were far below Wall Street's expectations. In recent months, Sallie Mae has been upbeat about the new opportunities it sees under the Trump administration.

Financial institutions see an opportunity to nab scale after years of tepid dealmaking, but investors are pushing back against such efforts out of concerns about shareholder value.

The Federal Reserve played a behind-the-scenes role in facilitating the sale of PacWest Bancorp, providing an enticement to private-equity interests to make a deal happen, according to agency records and recent comments by a prominent banking lawyer.

As opportunities grow for private student lending, Sallie Mae has entered a multiyear "strategic partnership" with the world's largest private equity firm.

Treasury market bulls and bears fought to a draw this week as conflicting private-sector data on the health of the US labor market left expectations for another Federal Reserve interest-rate cut in December in limbo.

Large banks seem comfortable paring back their capital positions while they await an updated proposal on the so-called Basel III endgame. The rules are widely expected to be more lax than what was proposed during the Biden administration.

The Tacoma, Washington-based bank, which has completed two mergers since 2023, said Thursday that it will buy back up to $700 million of its own shares over the next year.

American Banker's 2025 Small Business Banking conference yielded lessons about the need for speed, simplicity and safety in small-business lending. Other key takeaways included the significance of digital payment options and the importance of continuing to process SBA loan requests during the government shutdown.

The shutdown started with a flight into treasury bonds, putting downward pressure on financing costs, but several other developments slowed mortgage activity.

In what they claimed was a "world first," HSBC and IBM used a quantum computer to improve their price predictions on the European corporate bond market.