The chief executive of Lloyds is the last man standing among the banks that bore the brunt of the financial crisis.
Three years ago, Eric Daniels was busy cementing Lloyds’ reputation as something of a boring bank, reporting its first dividend increase in five years on the back of a steady rise in profits.
However, his business was plunged into the maelstrom when the deal to rescue HBOS — famously sealed at a cocktail party — left Lloyds bloated with toxic debt. Lloyds’s chairman, Sir Victor Blank, paid for that deal with his job as the bank took recourse to the taxpayer for funds.
Though Daniels, who was deeply involved in the HBOS rescue as well, has managed to hang on, determined to prove that the takeover would ultimately turn out to be a sound move. Last week, revealing half-year profits of £1.6 billion (US$2.5 billion) and a halving of bad debts, he was looking more secure.
Unlike Andy Hornby, a retailer who was hired by HBOS for his marketing skills, Daniels is a lifelong banker who had 25 years at Citibank under his belt before joining Lloyds in 2001. He is said to understand the ”plumbing” of the industry like few others and is well-regarded among fellow bankers.
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
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