Facebook's offer has takers; rates rising on risky business loans

Receiving Wide Coverage ...

Facebook's friends: Although no major American bank has announced an interest in a financial data-sharing deal with Facebook, a spokesman for the company said “several unnamed banks and credit card companies have voiced interest in teaming up with the social network, even proposing their own potential deals,” the Washington Post reports.

Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

UniCredit, Italy’s largest bank, said it stopped advertising on Facebook in March following the disclosure that the social media company shared user information with data firm Cambridge Analytica. CEO Jean-Pierre Mustier told the Wall Street Journal the bank “won’t advertise on Facebook again until the company improves its ethical standards.”

“The Group takes ethics very seriously,” he said.

Meanwhile, “PayPal is grappling with the opposing forces” of social media and financial services as it tries to turn Venmo, its mobile payments app, “into a more mainstream payments service. Venmo users link their bank accounts or credit cards to the app, allowing them to send payments with a few taps on their phones. Users often send messages with their payments, which are visible on a public newsfeed by default unless the settings are changed.” A privacy advocate said “she was able to ascertain a lot of intimate information” about users this way.

Wall Street Journal

Gassing up: Goldman Sachs is in talks to buy a cargo of liquefied natural gas, “a first for the Wall Street firm and a sign that its appetite for risk, though diminished since the crisis, hasn’t disappeared.” The move comes as “Goldman is under pressure to improve results in its commodities arm,” at the same time “regulators have tried to push banks out of the commodities business, imposing heavy capital charges on such trades as part of the Dodd-Frank overhaul.”

Risky business: An increasing number of higher-risk corporate borrowers has had to raise interest rates on leveraged loans in order to attract investors. “Some bankers think it is an early signal that liquidity is retreating from low-quality debt. The trouble for borrowers isn’t rising debt costs today, but the risk that loans will be harder to refinance in the future. This could leave lenders little choice but to extend the life of loans on whatever terms borrowers can afford.”

Bank exposure to private equity deals may also be growing. “There are potential risks to financial stability here,” but exact data is hard to come by. “This isn’t to say another 2008-style crisis is looming, but banks remain interconnected with private-market risks in ways that aren’t clear. We just don’t know how much will wash back onto their balance sheets next time the music stops.”

Out with the new: “Counter-intuitively, it is much easier for someone researching the history of a big bank to get their hands on an examination report from 1890 than from 1990,” assistant editorial page editor James Freeman found while researching a history of Citigroup. It seems the Federal Reserve and other bank regulators destroy the most recent bank examination reports but retain ancient ones.

Financial Times

Success!: Global financial regulators say post-crisis reforms designed to make the derivatives market safer have largely succeeded, mainly by requiring more deals be done through clearing houses. “Overall, the reforms are achieving their intended goals of promoting central clearing, especially for the most systemic market participants,” the report from the Financial Stability Board says.

Inside job: Australia’s corporate regulator will “embed” supervisory officers at the country’s biggest banks following a string of scandals. The move “is the latest example of a toughening regulatory environment in Australia, which is forcing financial institutions to tighten lending standards and review business models.” “We will have supervisory officers embedded for a significant period of time inside these large institutions because I know it makes a difference to the way that they behave,” said James Shipton, the chairman of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.

New York Times

Digging deeper: A Justice Department investigation into Goldman Sachs’ alleged role in the disappearance of $4 billion from a Malaysian government investment fund “is now more intensively focused on the potential culpability” of the bank. “The investigation is one of the marquee efforts by government authorities under President Trump to pursue a top Wall Street firm.”

Quotable

“It’s the most intimate information about our personal behavior possible, perhaps even more intimate than how we comment on our friends’ feeds. The idea that Facebook, which basically aggregates information to sell to third parties, could also add financial information to that mix seems uncomfortable, given their history.” — Zachary Townsend, California’s former chief data officer and a partner at Deciens Capital, a fintech venture capital fund.