Investment banking

On paper, the deal was a no-brainer: a $15 billion debt financing that would net banks hefty fees and kick off a year of mega-acquisitions even as central banks tightened the spigots on their pandemic support. Yet eight months after agreeing to finance the leveraged buyout of Citrix Systems, Wall Street is now staring at a very different picture.

Bank of America continues to spend on its people and is looking to add more investment bankers even as inflation pushes expenses higher, Chief Financial Officer Alastair Borthwick said.

Wall Street banks are poised to realize roughly $600 million of losses after offloading financing commitments for the buyout of Citrix Systems to investors Tuesday, the culmination of months of work to try and mitigate the damage from underwriting pledges made early in the year before a sharp repricing of risk assets.

Credit Suisse is considering reviving the First Boston brand name as the Swiss lender seeks ways to boost the fortunes of its beleaguered investment bank, according to people familiar with the matter.

After investment banking fees fell by 54% last quarter, the nation's largest bank by assets is considering cutting back. "Last year, we had to add a lot of bodies just to execute the huge amount of volume we were executing," Chief Operating Officer Daniel Pinto said Tuesday.

Jefferies Financial Group asked staffers to come back to the office on a more consistent basis as it looks to work through its investment banking backlog in the coming months.

Former Goldman banker Brijesh Goel was arrested last month for insider trading. His friend, ex-Barclays trader Akshay Niranjan, is "co-conspirator 1" in the criminal complaint against Goel, and the man who turned on his buddy, according to people familiar with the matter.

Credit Suisse Group is shifting resources in the pursuit of business from a broader range of rich clients, as the lender focuses more on wealth management amid cuts to its troubled investment bank. 

Conversations with about a dozen Credit Suisse dealmakers, traders, financiers and wealth advisors depict a unit girded for a reckoning.

Citigroup's markets operation had hundreds of blind spots, allowing for potentially abusive transactions to go unnoticed in almost 900,000 trades processed every day at the bank's Canary Wharf headquarters for more than two years.