Paul J. Davies

Captain Ahab never caught Moby Dick, but Morgan Stanley shows how tracking billionaire tech whales like Elon Musk can eventually land a fortune. Not long ago, the bank appeared to have shot itself in the foot as lead lender on the disastrous $44 billion buyout of social media platform Twitter, now known as X. But by staying close to Musk until the mercurial entrepreneur’s rocket company SpaceX listed on Nasdaq, the bank has more than won back its earlier losses.

It’s easy to dismiss comparisons between finance today and the build up to the 2008 meltdown as exaggerated or overwrought. But right now, it’s hard to ignore evidence that we’ve entered a fresh golden age of financial engineering — and it should be impossible to forget that the products of this alchemy can tarnish easily or, worse, turn out to be iron pyrite.

It's easy to dismiss comparisons between finance today and the build up to the 2008 meltdown as exaggerated or overwrought.

Europe’s big banks have joined the global stock trading party. Danger lurks, however: When the market turns, it is often brutal.

A near miss can be more dangerous than a crash when it emboldens risk takers. Last week’s humbling of artificial intelligence-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness amid the selloff in US and South Korean stocks looks like such a moment. Investors still have a huge amount of borrowed money backing their bets on the technology boom, and many have spent recent days buying the dip. And, right now, Wall Street’s traditional yardstick for assessing how much leverage is behind stocks may be creating

When a super-secretive trading giant suddenly refinances billions of dollars of debt, people (at least those in finance) want to know why. Jane Street Group, the electronic market maker, has invited speculation by repaying its existing loans and bonds, and replacing them by selling nearly $15 billion of new bonds to a much smaller group of investors.

The German government is finally accepting the inevitable: UniCredit Group SpA has essentially won the battle for Commerzbank AG. The finance ministry still holds a stake in Commerzbank and is seeking a gracious exit after bitterly opposing the Italian takeover. It may be closer to finding a way out, but that will resolve just one of the challenges UniCredit faces in making a success of its victory — so much bad blood has been stirred up on both sides in this drawn-out fight that a happy marriag

A dragon’s lair isn’t where most people would stash their cash, even in fantasy fiction. But that’s not slowing down the real-world Erebor Bank — named after the mountain home of a treasure-hoarding beast in JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit. The tech-focused lender, founded by Palmer Luckey and backed by Peter Thiel, wants to conquer the market Silicon Valley Bank dominated before it collapsed in 2023. That’s not necessarily a bright idea.

A classic book on Wall Street and investing once asked: Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? Watching the rapid unwinding of ties between Mark Walter, his investment firm and its insurance companies has me asking: Why were the customers financing his trophy assets?