Liam Proud

Private-equity moguls are ruthless capitalists, except when sharing out profits. Buyout shops often pool their 20% cut of the upside from running a fund, known as carried interest or “carry”. In doing so, they effectively socialise the winning and losing bets across a team.

Half Marks. HSBC is a singular beast. The $167 billion bank is listed and headquartered in London, but makes most of its money in Asia, with clients ranging from Hong Kong savers to giant Western companies. No one possesses the long list of skills that would make them the perfect fit to run the group. That makes choosing its next CEO an exercise in compromise for Chair Mark Tucker, who is considering both internal and external candidates to replace the departing Noel Quinn.Investors and people who know HSBC agree the perfect boss would be a readily available proven executive with experience of Western and Asian markets, and a solid understanding of the bank’s $3 trillion balance sheet and HSBC’s idiosyncratic culture. Headhunters working on such complex assignments often quantify candidates’ credentials across different factors. It’s an instructive exercise.Breakingviews has graded potential internal and external CEO candidates by assigning them a score from nought to five in six different categories. None of them score full marks. Chief Financial Officer Georges Elhedery does best: his current role exposes him to everything from UK mortgages to Mexican trade finance. However, he hasn’t lived permanently in HSBC’s core market of Hong Kong or had sole responsibility for a key business line.Other internal candidates – like retail and wealth boss Nuno Matos, investment banking head Greg Guyett and commercial boss Barry O’Byrne – score better on those fronts, but less well on others. Their experience at HSBC has focused on either the consumer or wholesale side.By definition, none of the internal contenders has ever led a bank. If that matters most to Tucker, he could look at UniCredit CEO Andrea Orcel, Lloyds Banking Group’s Charlie Nunn or Helen Wong, who runs Singapore’s OCBC. The latter two CEOs have the benefit of previously working for HSBC.But hiring from outside means compromising on availability. Rival executives will have non-compete clauses, which usually means lengthy gardening leave. The same is probably true for Simon Cooper, another HSBC alumnus who recently stepped down as head of corporate and investment banking at rival Standard Chartered. A long wait is not ideal for HSBC, which has not given investors financial guidance for 2025, and whose shareholders want to know what the growth plan is when interest rates fall.The biggest test for any new boss will be dealing with rising tensions between China and the West while navigating HSBC, which has rejected numerous outsiders in the past. Working with Tucker, who is choosing his third CEO in less than seven years, is another challenge. The only consolation is that the ideal candidate probably does not exist.

The journey across the pond is getting crowded. Ferguson , the $42 billion plumbing supplier, switched its primary listing from London to New York in 2022, and $55 billion cement maker CRH followed last year. On Friday, $34 billion gambling group Flutter Entertainment plans to join them.

The fate of a 12 billion euro Spanish deal may be decided in Frankfurt. Not by European Central Bank regulators, who generally favour consolidation, but by its ratesetters. Sharp changes to monetary policy could make or break the investment case for Banco de Sabadell – and therefore its M&A defence against Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria .

Non-executive directors at UK and EU-based firms own little equity in the companies they oversee. In this Exchange podcast, Liad Meidar of the hedge fund Gatemore argues that this is a problem, while Peter Boreham of the pay consultancy Mercer explains why it’s hard to change.

Société Générale is firmly out of favour. Shares in the 19 billion euro French lender trade at one-third of forecast tangible book value – a 60% discount to the 11-member peer group detailed in the company’s annual report. The gap is at its widest in at least a decade. A breakup could help.

Noel Quinn, the outgoing boss of $167 billion HSBC , , has spent the last five years focusing on supposedly growthy businesses like Asian wealth management. Yet half-year results show a bank struggling with falling net interest income. For incoming CEO Georges Elhedery, the solution requires luck and investor patience.

UBS boss Sergio Ermotti faces two big questions. Can he successfully integrate Credit Suisse, which his bank acquired last year in a state-backed rescue, and can he prove that the combined group has a reliable growth engine? Based on the bank’s most recent results, he’s convincing on the first point but less so on the second. That uncertainty will keep the $100 billion group’s valuation in check.

Swiss consumer-goods giant Nestlé has had a rough few years. The board’s decision to replace CEO Mark Schneider with insider Laurent Freixe, announced on Thursday evening, was abrupt but justifiable. The danger for investors is that the turnaround job will now be more painful than they had expected.

Private-equity dealmakers like to boast about the ways they improve companies, like supercharging growth or trimming costs. The evidence, however, suggests that buyout barons owe a large chunk of their success to rising valuation multiples instead. Since that boost seems likely to fade away, industry titans like Stephen Schwarzman’s Blackstone and Henry Kravis’s KKR will have to work harder to kee