The Journal

Read The Journal for PricewaterhouseCoopers’ views on the latest hot topics for the Banking and Capital Markets industries.

Search for viewpoints on key issues including:

• M&A
• Human Capital
• Financial reporting
• Regulatory and compliance
• Risk
• Government ownership

New viewpoints will be published here regularly. View The Journal publication.

Recent articles:

Stress testing: from stressful times to business as usual
by Fernando de la Mora, Dan Weiss and Michael Shearer
Public debate of the Federal Reserve's stress test results - which called on 10 of the largest 19 US banks to raise $74.6 billion in additional capital - has tended to take the form of a lively back-and-forth about the appropriateness of the scenarios used, or has focused on the short-term implications for individual institutions. These issues are important.
But the tests also raise a number of other themes which have far wider relevance for the industry and which will shape the way that banks think about capital, run their businesses and manage their risks for many years to come.

Reward: The new paradigm for Asia
by Ron Collard and Debra Eckersley
Financial services in the Asia-Pacific region may be less directly involved in the apparent excesses over financial services reward that have generated much media comment and political and regulator involvement in recent months. Nevertheless Asia-Pacific is not immune from the wholesale review and change that is taking place globally in the approach to reward.

Releasing cash and reducing cost without losing strategic agility
by Mark Jansen and Edmund Lee
In good times, financial institutions talk about their employees as assets. In bad times, they are seen as a cost. Lately, newspapers around the world have been filled with stories of financial institutions cutting costs and/or jobs, counterbalanced by governments encouraging executives to think twice before laying off staff. Very few countries have been spared.

China's Enterprise Bankruptcy Law: Can it help overseas financiers recover their debts?
by Victor Jong and Ted Osborn
There is little doubt that the financial turmoil and economic slowdown in global markets since the second half of 2008 has taken its toll on many businesses, especially those operating in overseas markets such as the United States and Europe. For companies in China, dependent on trade with these markets, weakened global demand for consumer products is now resulting in factory closures and distressed situations.

Getting risk appetite right
by Richard Barfield and Immy Pandor
As the crisis has rumbled on, more and more chief executives have been forced to explain losses that were many times larger than they or their shareholders had expected. In each case, the story boils down to the same, deceptively simple, failing: banks had taken more risk than they intended. This article looks at what went wrong and how to fix it.