Elevator Going Up?
It is preferable not to make sudden moves in the executive suite. For Comerica Inc., this meant bringing in a successor to longtime business banking head Dale Greene almost a year before his retirement.
Lars Anderson, previously a group banking executive and an executive vice president at BB&T Corp., is to join Comerica Monday as the vice chairman of its commercial lending arm. At BB&T, he oversaw lending activities in 12 regions and helped manage BB&T's Colonial Bank acquisition in Texas. Now 49, he had worked more than 25 years at BB&T.
Greene, meanwhile, is to end his tenure of more than three decades at Comerica in the third quarter of next year.
In a research note issued after Anderson's appointment was announced, Sandler O'Neill & Partners LP analyst Scott Siefers lauded Comerica's choice as both currently sensible and as a longer-term leadership project.
"He brings senior management experience from a well-respected superregional bank," Siefers wrote. "Additionally, his appointment may also lead to speculation that he could ultimately succeed Ralph Babb as CEO upon his eventual retirement."
Stress 'R' Us
Sometimes, just knowing that the markets are rotten isn't good enough. You need to know how rotten they really are.
That sentiment has led to investors' years-long fascination with the Chicago Board Option Exchange's VIX, a measure of expected volatility in stock futures. Highly profitable through licensing deals, the index's success has been drawing competition. The most recent is the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Financial Stress Index — and who knows stress better these days than B of A? The company is billing its index as "a better measure of financial market stress than the VIX."
Produced by Benjamin Bowler, global head of equity derivatives, the index includes "twenty measures of stress across five asset classes and various geographies."
Hedging volume, liquidity, high-yield bond appetites and currency-option skew — it's all there. Back-tested to 2000, the GFSI would have done great work in measuring coming selloffs, Bank of America says — and its components allow it to capture risks worldwide. As of Wednesday, it had a reading of 0.26, indicating marginally elevated market stress.
Thinking Big
Robert Cummings Jr., a veteran dealmaker who worked at the recently bankrupted asset manager GSC Group Inc. after 27 years at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., is joining JPMorgan Chase & Co. as vice chairman of investment banking with the aim of deepening the New York company's reach among big, multinational clients.
Cummings, 60, was a partner in Goldman's corporate finance division, advising on acquisitions and strategic financing before retiring in 2001. He worked at GSC — which filed for bankruptcy in September because the credit crisis had hurt asset values — from 2002 to 2009, retiring as a senior managing director.
