Receiving Wide Coverage ...
Bigger than Facebook: It's all Alibaba, all the time. The Chinese e-commerce company released the prospectus for its U.S. IPO and the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal all lavished heaps of coverage on the disclosure. For the banking world, the most-interesting item was the document's identification of the lucky banks that stand to make millions of dollars in fees from the offering. Credit Suisse nabbed the coveted lead left spot followed by Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup, the Times reported. To get a sense of how lucrative the IPO could be for the banks, the Post reported that Alibaba's offering could top Facebook's $16 billion IPO. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Bloomberg
Equity Funds Probed: Private equity funds allocated expenses and collected fees inappropriately and sometimes illegally, a Securities and Exchange probe found, the Journal reported. The SEC began examining the private equity world after Dodd-Frank gave the agency more oversight of money managers, Bloomberg noted.
Wall Street Journal
The investigation by U.S. regulators into banks' hiring practices in Asia expanded, as they look into banks' hiring of the family members of foreign governments' officials, the Journal reported. The banks that received letters requesting additional information include JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and UBS. Other banks also received the letters, the paper said, although it did not identify them. The paper notes that the Securities and Exchange Commission's probe is based on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a federal law that bans U.S. companies from bribing foreign officials; however, that law does not forbid the hiring of family members of government officials.
JPMorgan Chase promoted two executives to replace Blythe Masters, who's leaving as head of its commodities business. John Anderson had been head of non-oil energy trading in Houston and Michael Camacho had been the London-based head of commodities for Europe, the Middle East and Africa and global head of other commodities units.
Financial Times
Now California's state employees' pension plan is taking a swing at Bank of America, the paper reported. Calpers said on Tuesday that it will vote its shares representing 0.4% of the company against Bank of America's external auditor at the bank's annual meeting, in protest of the Fed's suspension of B of A's capital plans. On Monday, Calpers' younger cousin, the California teachers' pension plan, said it would vote its 0.3% stake against B of A's auditors for the same reason.
JPMorgan Chase is closing the accounts of some foreign officials in its quest to purge itself of any grounds to be sued, prosecuted or fined over anti-money laundering violations, the paper reported. JPMorgan said it was closing the accounts because of compliance costs.
