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lesliepicker.bsky.social
@CNBC Senior Banking and Finance Reporter
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Prolific Poster

BofA on "disorderly selling" of last week: “The selling was pretty extreme, and thus the outsized moves in many consensus longs on no company-specific news, clearly triggered risk-management to kick in in various ways”

"The U.S. and its allies have already been hitting Russia with sanctions and other punitive measures for years, including an effort to cap the price of oil exported by Russia and kick Russian banks out of the SWIFT international payments messaging system." www.wsj.com/world/russia...

"MAGA doesn't stand for 'Making M&A Great Again"...but with the "more thoughtful oversight at the FTC, we will see a pickup in corporate activity." -- Treasury Secretary Bessent on Squawk Box this morning. www.cnbc.com/video/2025/0...

Bank Stocks Week-to-Date: Citigroup: -12.8% Morgan Stanley: -11.1% BofA: -10.2% Goldman Sachs: -9.5% Wells Fargo: -9.4% JPMorgan: -7.8%

They're really putting the "if" in tariff

"Heading into '25, Hedge Funds lowered their net long exposure to 160%, which is below average and off the November high." -- via Jefferies

"Is this even an issue for Wall Street? Big U.S. banks had plenty of hopes that Mr. Trump would decrease regulations, encourage merger activity and slash taxes. Expanding their presence in Canada was not on the list." www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/b...

Seven years ago…

"Buyout firms managed $4.7 trillion in assets as of June last year -- down about 2 percent from 2023, according to a report from consultancy Bain & Co. The decline in assets was the first since Bain began tracking industry assets in 2005." www.ft.com/content/c7ac...

Apparently, CoreWeave trademarked "AI Hyperscaler" last year. www.sec.gov/Archives/edg...

It's annual culling season on Wall Street. I'm told a few thousand Goldman employees will be affected -- matching what the WSJ reported here -- and it won't be limited to VPs. But overall headcount is expected to remain stagnant. www.wsj.com/finance/gold...

Original suit from the CFPB claimed that bank customers have lost over $870 million throughout the network's seven years of operation due to lack of consumer safeguards. www.cnbc.com/2025/03/04/c...

I'm told by a person familiar that BlackRock has briefed the administration/Congress on the deal. Hutchison saying in the release "the transaction is purely commercial in nature and wholly unrelated to recent political news reports concerning the Panama Ports."

BlackRock's GIP-led consortium to acquire majority interest in the Panama Ports Company (and 43 additional ports in 23 countries), from CK Hutchison -- the ports that President Trump has claimed are controlled by the Chinese. The aggregate EV of the portfolio is inked at $23B.

CFPB insiders say the plan from Vought & Musk is to reduce the agency to "Five Men and a Phone" buried somewhere in a DC office. For more, read this 👇 www.cnbc.com/2025/02/28/c...

"The share of New Yorkers in poverty was nearly double the national average in 2023 and had increased by seven percentage points in just two years." (The poverty threshold for a couple with two children in a rental household in NYC is $47,190) www.nytimes.com/2025/02/26/n...

Widespread AI adoption could raise the fair value of Chinese equities by 15-20% over the next decade, according to Goldman Sachs Research

There's a TON to ask Jamie Dimon about this afternoon. Please tune in to my interview with the JPMorgan Chairman & CEO, live from the firm's 30th-annual Global Leveraged Finance Conference on CNBC

Bank of America's Moynihan reiterates what his economic desk has already said: the window for Fed rate cuts is closed shut. @lesliepicker.bsky.social @cnbc.com $BAC www.cnbc.com/2025/02/12/b...

Tomorrow on Squawk on the Street @CNBC: Bank of America Chairman & CEO Brian Moynihan. We'll discuss the macro environment, the state of banking, the state of debanking, crypto, AI and more. Hope you'll tune in!

❤️💛

CFPB Director Rohit Chopra says on Squawk Box that he expects his successor to be a ‘’watchdog, not a lapdog,’’ under President Trump

In response to President Trump telling BofA CEO Brian Moynihan to "open the bank up to conservatives" amid allegations of political de-banking, the firm shared this statement: "We serve more than 70 million clients, we welcome conservatives and have no political litmus test."

* AXIOS CITING U.S. OFFICIAL: GAZA CEASEFIRE DEAL REACHED @reuters.com

Please tune in tomorrow at 1:30 p.m. ET for our exclusive interview with Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser. Between the firm's ongoing transformation, industry-wide regulation, and the broader macro environment, there's no shortage of topics to discuss. @cnbc.com

No, Wall Street doesn’t hate good economic news. It fears the strong jobs report overstates current momentum and will prompt bond yields and Fed to get tighter than the economy ultimately can handle. New column, on a 2025 tape that’s tougher to please, easier to rattle. www.cnbc.com/2025/01/11/b...

The SPDR S&P Bank ETF ($KBE) is trading at levels it hasn't seen since the day before the election and is currently 14 percent below recent highs from late November. Round trip ticket for bank investors.

"Back office, middle office and operations are likely to be most at risk...Customer services could see changes as bots manage client functions, while know-your-customer duties would also be vulnerable." www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

PE-backed IPOs are likely to comprise a bigger component of activity this year, thanks, in part, to the performance of the 2024 class of IPOs: PE-backed IPOs have seen median gains of 20.7 percent versus a median loss of 6.8 percent for VC-backed. www.youtube.com/watch?v=RszP...

Here's a link to the dwindling list of Net-Zero Banking Alliance members after the big banks dropped out. Very few U.S.-based banks are left: Amalgamated Bank, Areti Bank and Climate First Bank (all ESG-oriented firms) www.unepfi.org/net-zero-ban...

Never too early for financial literacy! @overheardnewyork.bsky.social

The small overlap between the bank beat and gentle parenting: reward for good behavior, don’t punish for bad

Best-Performers on S&P 500 with one more trading day left: Palantir: 350% Vistra: 263% Nvidia: 178% United Airlines: 138% Axon Enterprise: 134%

See you today from 9am to 12pm on CNBC with @michaelsantoli.bsky.social and @davidfaber.bsky.social from the NYSE. The last market open of 2024. May the futures be merry and bright 🎄

Alan Blinder: "One of my colleagues joked that most Americans thought the Federal Reserve was a national forest." No wonder everyone is so focused on how much they're cutting! www.wsj.com/opinion/will...

The bank industry's, "...lowest-paid employees keep getting caught selling sensitive customer information out the back door — emerging as a critical area of weakness in banks’ risk controls." www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

"Credit card lenders wrote off $46bn in seriously delinquent loan balances in the first nine months of 2024, up 50 per cent from the same period in the year prior and the highest level in 14 years, according to industry data collated by BankRegData." www.ft.com/content/c755...

Nice deep dive on the explosion in private credit, tracing back to Blue Owl's (formerly Owl Rock) founding story and highlighting the potential risks amid the recent popularity of the asset class. www.nytimes.com/2024/12/27/b...

It's been a good year for private markets and those that make a living investing in them. www.ft.com/content/ffe4...

Our story today @cnbc.com: Will 2025 unleash the animal spirits for bank mergers, due to potential deregulation that makes deal-making easier? Or will deregulation bring down compliance costs, leaving banks with less of a need to bulk up and scale?

Santa Claus Rally looking a little more like Elf on the Shelf

"The banks are pushing on an open door at the Fed." -- Former Fed Vice Chairman of Supervision Randy Quarles in response to the industry lawsuit against the central bank over the stress-test process that appears to be in sync with issues the Fed has said it's committed to improving