Brief: Lawmakers must approve another round of fiscal stimulus to keep the U.S. economic recovery on track, executives from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. said Friday. Goldman President John Waldron applauded the federal government’s rapid financial response in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, but said more needs to be done. The absence of additional stimulus could hamper the comeback, particularly in the U.S., he said during the Institute of International Finance annual membership meeting, held virtually this year. “We are going to see a much tougher road to recovery,” Waldron said. Coming back fully from the crisis will take longer, and “people will be laid on the side of the road, sadly.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Democratic colleagues Thursday evening that “disagreements remain” with President Donald Trump’s administration over a number of components of the stimulus she’s attempting to negotiate, even as an agreement nears on a Covid-19 testing program. The establishment of a national testing strategy had been a roadblock cited by Pelosi and her aides this week during talks with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Wells Fargo Chief Executive Officer Charlie Scharf said during a separate IIF panel discussion Friday that additional stimulus is needed with the U.S. “not out of the woods” yet.
Brief: As Wall Street banks reported quarterly results this week, investors wondered about the staying power of the trading bonanza that has floated profits, offsetting problems in traditional lending businesses that have been hurt by the pandemic. Trading revenue was up 4% to 29% at the five U.S. banks with major trading operations. Otherwise, lower interest rates hit lending income and prompted banks to add to loan-loss reserves. Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Morgan Stanley benefited most, because they do not have the lending operations of rivals like JPMorgan Chase & Co, Bank of America Corp or Citigroup Inc. Enthusiasm about trading revenue among bank shareholders has faded since the 2007-2009 financial crisis, when the businesses were shown to be black boxes of risk-taking that could generate huge losses. Later, banks’ trading revenue fell dramatically because of new regulations and clients avoiding profitable products they once peddled. Now, trading businesses tend to move in line with market trends or with a bank’s strengths rather than with taking home-run risks. It remained hard to tell why, exactly, Bank of America might experience a 2.5% gain in bond trading whereas Morgan Stanley saw a 35% increase.
Brief: Late Wednesday, the New York Times reported the story of how officials from the Donald Trump administration had privately expressed fear of a coronavirus outbreak while publicly expressing more positive views — and how that information had been sold onto at least one hedge fund by a “consultant. But who is William Callanan, the “outsourced strategy officer” at the center of the storm? Callanan is best known for his efforts as a portfolio manager, analyst, and investment strategist who worked at some of the most high-profile macro hedge funds in the business: Soros Fund Management, Fortress Investment Group, and Stanley Druckenmiller’s Duquesne Capital, according to published reports. In 2019, Callanan left another well-known hedge fund firm — Key Square Capital, started by former Soros investment chief Scott Bessent — to start London-based Syzygy Investment Advisory. Callanan, an astronomy buff, named the investment advisory firm after an astrological term for the alignment of three celestial bodies, according to a Financial Times report last year. Rather than make its own investments, Syzygy provides long-term investment themes “and aggressive ways of trading them” to hedge funds, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and other clients who implement the positions themselves, according to the FT report.
Brief: When it comes to trends in real estate investing, the coronavirus has exacted a toll, according to the annual Emerging Trends in Real Estate report. Densely populated metropolises, once viewed as preferred destinations for millennials, are now being challenged by smaller cities and suburbs. At the same time, co-living and co-working arrangements, for reasons due to human proximity, are being rethought, according to the report, the result of a survey and interviews with industry participants by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Urban Land Institute. "My one take away is take nothing for granted ... I've seen many cycles but nothing like this," Mitchell Roschelle, managing partner of new strategy advisory firm Macro Trends Advisors, said Wednesday during a panel discussing the latest Emerging Trend's report. Behavior can change very quickly, said Christopher Lee, partner and head of Americas real estate at Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., a speaker on the same panel. For real estate, Mr. Lee said, it means that behaviors of businesses and consumers can change "in ways we've never seen before and it is happening very rapidly."
Brief: A new survey of more than 250 alternative investment professionals finds that a strong majority expect a return to pre-pandemic levels of deal activity by the close of 2021. The survey, conducted during EisnerAmper’s Virtual 5th Annual Alternative Investment Summit, shows that 74% of industry professionals predict a return to pre-COVID-19 deal activity by the end of Q4 2021. Two in five (41%) respondents predicted an even swifter recovery, with a return to pre-pandemic deal activity by the end of Q2 2021. When asked to identify the industries that present the best chance for growth in Q4 2020, respondents pegged technology and health care/life sciences as the sectors with the greatest opportunities. This largely mirrored results from EisnerAmper’s 2019 survey, when technology, cannabis, and health care/life sciences were named as the strongest growth sectors. EisnerAmper’s survey also identified the major trends that will impact how the alternatives sector operates moving forward. Many dealmakers hit the pause button in March 2020 when COVID-19 caused a global economic crisis and dramatically shifted the ways in which deals get done. Despite the investment industry continuing to largely operate in a work-from-home setting, 80% of private equity executives agree that they have been able to satisfactorily conduct deal due diligence during the pandemic.
Brief: Watered-down shareholder participation at AGMs, due to virtual meetings during the pandemic, is sounding alarm bells at APG, the largest pension fund in Europe, where collaboration with other asset owners and organisations is the beating heart of its ESG strategy and a central tenet to its stewardship response to the pandemic. Virtual annual meetings may be the pandemic norm, but Dutch asset manager APG is concerned about the consequences of lost face-to-face engagement and the ability of investors to collaborate to put pressure on companies to change. “In our view, AGMs as they are now can only be an interim solution,” said Claudia Kruse, managing director, global responsible investment and governance, APG, Europe’s biggest pension fund in an interview with Top1000funds.com. The majority of AGMs that APG has attended since the shut down due to the pandemic are one-way webcams, simply speeches that don’t involve two-way dialogue. Nor is the advance voting process as effective according to Kruse. “We’ve participated in 10 webcast AGMs and sometimes put forward questions as part of a collective engagement, but of course the votes are cast in advance,” she said. In other cases, questions are not put forward as part of collective engagement, and interaction between the board and retail investors is also lost. Possible solutions include hybrid models where investors can participate virtually in conjunction with a smaller physical meeting, said Kruse.