And the second question is I would like you to tell us a little bit more about the key hires you have made in the quarter. You mentioned that several times especially, I understand, in the fixed income division. How many people are you talking about? What kind of people are those, et cetera? Thank you.
John Cryan
Okay. Well, on your first one, the liquidity buffer isn’t technically being reclassified. We are letting it run off in the Investment Bank, which it does anyway. It turns over very, very frequently and as it turns over, we’re rebuilding it in the Corporate Center. Now that’s of very little relevance because the cost of the buffer was anyway charged out from the Investment Bank to the other divisions. A large amount of these costs retained by the Investment Bank but it charged the other divisions with some of the costs. Moving it to the Corporate Center doesn’t change that, because our cost allocation still works on the same, or pretty much the same basis. So we’re not technically reclassifying. And just a small correction, the assets in the Investment Bank were not held to maturity. They were in the trading book.
Daniel Zulauf – Basler Zeitung
Okay. Yes.
John Cryan
And they now come out of the trading book and because we don’t hold big trading books in the Corporate Center, we are classifying them when we rebuild them, as held available for sale.
Daniel Zulauf – Basler Zeitung
Okay.
John Cryan
Now, that may not be forever because the accountants are proposing, at the moment, to abolish available for sale but for the time being, at least, that’s how we hold them. And the reason I raised it is so that the analysts could look in the quarterly report at the balance sheet and see the buffer being moved into the Corporate Center, into a separate accounting category and a separate line on the balance sheet.
Daniel Zulauf – Basler Zeitung
Okay.
John Cryan
And so there’s no connection between that and the fact that we failed to recognize what would have been 1.8 billion francs of trading revenues in the quarter. But because we reclassified certain assets last October, November, December quarter then we hold those as loans and receivables and we’re not allowed to mark them up when their market value goes up. The fact that they go back and become worth a lot more means that, potentially, at some stage we could sell them. And the interest that we accrue on them is higher, but we’re not allowed to mark them up in our books and take trading income. But had we not reclassified them, you’re right, that would have been additional revenue and therefore additional pre–tax profit. But there’s no connection between that and the liquidity buffer.
Daniel Zulauf – Basler Zeitung
Okay.
John Cryan
On the key hires, I suppose the most notable hire in the quarter was Mr. Robert McCann, to come in to run our Wealth Management Americas business and his arrival was subject to a separate press release. I’m sure you’re aware of his arrival. I think the other ones that have received some coverage are in the fixed income division. Although that’s not where they’ve been confined to. We’ve hired some very good corporate financiers and corporate advisers and we’ve hired some senior people into our equities business. We’ve rehired some people back to our equities business, who left us. We’ve new leadership, as you may know, in the investment banking department. One gentlemen who had been with us for some time and then one who had been our head of equities trading and come back to run our corporate advisory business.
In fixed income, we’ve hired, essentially, a new team in credit trading. A very few people left over from a small team we had beforehand. And then in the rates business and the core fixed income businesses, we’ve hired a number of relatively senior people. They generally are sales people and that would support our flow trading strategy, because our strategy would be to originate and issue fixed income product and sell that to institutional shareholders. And it’s that distribution sales force that we’ve been building up. And that’s a slightly different model from the one that we had pre-crisis, where we were essentially using our balance sheet as a principle repository for fixed income products and not selling it and distributing it properly, frankly and as effectively as we should have done, so a lot of building up of sales and distribution forces.
|