Deutsche Bank Shuts Credit-Trading Unit in London
Aug. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Deutsche Bank AG, Germany's biggest bank, is disbanding a London-based team of traders that made wrong-way bets on credit-markets using the firm's money, said a person familiar with the situation.
Some members of the 14-person team are leaving the bank and others are being assigned to new posts, said the person, who declined to be identified because the Frankfurt-based lender doesn't want to publicize the job cuts. Another group of credit- market traders in New York will remain intact, the person said.
Stacey Coglan, a spokeswoman for the bank in London, declined to comment.
Deutsche Bank, which posted Wall Street's highest fixed- income trading revenue in the first half, is dissolving the London team after it lost more than 100 million euros ($136 million) in the last month, the person said. While the move may stem losses, it eliminates a source of potential revenue growth, said Kinner Lakhani, an analyst at ABN Amro Holding NV in London.
``Getting rid of a whole team implies getting rid of a strategy and the earnings going forward,'' said Lakhani, who rates Deutsche Bank stock ``hold.''
Deutsche Bank shares fell 0.6 percent to 89.6 euros in Frankfurt. They've dropped 24 percent from a mid-May peak amid concern about losses on fixed-income investments and reduced demand for high-risk, high-yield bonds and loans. U.S. home loans held in subprime-mortgage bonds are going bad at the fastest rate in 10 years, eroding confidence in asset-backed securities and corporate credit.
Still, in the first six months of the year, Deutsche Bank's debt-trading revenue jumped 19 percent from a year earlier to 6.24 billion euros. In dollar terms, that topped Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the world's biggest securities firm by market value, and Citigroup Inc., the biggest U.S. bank.