FURTHER FURTHER READING
- The trial of Fabrice Tourre: silly, pettifogging, quixotic.
- Plus: the SEC's Pellegrini problem in the case.
- Josh Brown's notes from Delivering Alpha, part one, part two, and part three.
- Glass-Steagall 2.0: would it ignore shadow banking?
- Setting up the new US health insurance market -- from the inside.
- More on the execution of 'China's Madoff'.
- Sovereign debt litigation victory du jour.
- Another glorious chapter in the genre of trader-bragging emails.
ROUND-UP
Bernanke tweaks tapering message in Congress testimony: 'The Fed chairman went out of his way to argue that the Fed's scenario for tapering down asset purchases – under which it would start later this year and bring asset purchases to a halt in the middle of 2014 with unemployment at 7 per cent – would depend entirely on the performance of the economy and asset purchases could even be increased if it does badly...' (Financial Times)
Intel Q2 earnings: revenues fell 5 per cent to $12.8bn -- and the company is forecasting $13.5bn in revenue for the third quarter, compared to Wall Street expectations of $13.7bn (Financial Times).
IBM Q2 earnings: revenues fell 3.3 per cent to $24.9bn, below expectations -- but the company raised its 2013 outlook for earnings. Its non-GAAP earnings were $3.91 per share compared to the $3.77 per share expected (Reuters).
Bank of New York Mellon described parts of the proposed US bank leverage ratio as "perverse" in their treatment of central bank securities and government bonds. "It's kind of perverse to think that we have to hold capital against cash that we hold at central banks," Gerald Hassell, the bank's chairman and chief executive said (Financial Times).
PepsiCo should buy Mondelez and spin out its slow-growing beverages unit, according to Nelson Peltz of Trian Partners. Pepsi could buy the Oreo maker for $35 to $38 a share before paying a cash dividend and completing the spin-out, he told CNBC's Delivering Alpha conference in New York (Financial Times). Trian has stakes of more than $1bn in Mondelez and Pepsi, which told Peltz that it "right now doesn't love" his idea. Mondelez shares rose 2 per cent on Wednesday (Wall Street Journal).
The FERC could be about to levy the biggest fine in its history against JPMorgan, in a settlement of allegations that the bank manipulated Californian and Midwestern energy markets. Despite the talks over a fine that could run into hundreds of millions of dollars, the bank's head of commodities Blythe Masters has resisted moves to ban traders (Wall Street Journal, Financial Times).
