As CECL adoption ramps up and nears completion, many banks—both 2020 and 2023 filers—are looking to validate CECL estimates. And there is no question that this has become a much more cumbersome process with banks facing an unfamiliar economic environment, changing portfolios, and hidden credit losses masked by modifications and government intervention.
|
Municipal securities are an important part of the fixed-income market. While small, at $4.2 trillion compared with the U.S. bond market at $52.9 trillion, municipal bonds are a critical financing vehicle for cities, towns and states. The lion’s share of municipal financing is for large, long-lived assets such as roads, bridges, hospitals and schools.
|
According to the Bond Buyer, “September municipal bond issuance declined 43% year-over-year, with nearly every structure and sector seeing large drops, as issuers eschewed the market amid another Federal Reserve rate hike and severe global market volatility.”1 Municipal bonds sold off in sympathy with Treasuries and as a consequence, yields increased to the highest level of the year.
|
Amid a variety of global events, 2022 has been a challenging year for many ESG investment strategies. Energy companies, most often associated with encouraging fossil fuel dependency, have performed well given the spike in energy prices driven by supply chain issues and the war in Ukraine. However, many ESG strategies screen out energy companies over concerns about their impact on climate change. At the same time, many ESG-related investment strategies have been overweighting allocations to technology stocks, which have performed relatively poorly for most of the year.
|
The acronym “ESG” stands for environmental, social and governance. More importantly, the term ESG has become synonymous with the concept of “sustainability.” In the capital markets, ESG criteria are a set of standards that should help to assess an organization’s operations and evaluate potential investments in securities issued by those organizations.
|
As the Federal Reserve raises rates to combat rising inflation, the consumer price index soared to another 40-year high as prices rose 9.1% in June. Inflation has investors worried, so let’s take a step back and review key related concepts and debunk an important myth.
|
Middle-office operations are critical to your business, but often bogged down by manual processes, paper documents, and human error. Artificial intelligence (AI), digital transformation, intelligent automation, and other next-generation technologies help address these challenges. There are a variety of ways to improve middle-office efficiency and accuracy, such as through outsourcing or hosting services. SS&C is hosting a selection of free webinars related to middle-office operations.
|
Ronald Reagan once said, “Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hitman.”
But what do we actually mean by inflation? By the same token, how confident are you of defining deflation, disinflation and hyperinflation?
Reagan was elected US president in 1980. At the time, the price of a gallon of unleaded gas was about $1.13. By the end of May 2022, the same commodity costs $4.61—an increase of 308%.
|