The sale of EMI Music Publishing could be music to bounty hunters’ ears. Sony’s move to take control of the venerable song publisher could mean a big payout for a key figure in the furor over the scandal at Malaysian fund 1MDB. When Sony first invested in 2012, it was financially weak. So it had some odd allies, including Abu Dhabi state investor Mubadala, the estate of Michael Jackson, and private equity group Blackstone. Malaysian dealmaker Jho Low’s Jynwel Capital was also involved. The financier has since achieved far greater notoriety, with U.S. authorities saying he was central to the

Much of the stock market’s recent boom resided in an acronym: FAANG, for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google, aka Alphabet. As important as they’ve become, investors tired of this trade can look forward in 2018 to a new set of letters to jumble into a more exciting investment thesis. Call it SLAW. Four of the most highly valued private companies – Spotify, Lyft, Airbnb and WeWork – are in various stages of preparing to go public. Although none may ever match the scale of a FAANG or a BAT – as China’s Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent are known –

James Gorman is rubbing Goldman Sachs’ nose in it. Morgan Stanley’s chief executive didn’t just hit his return target with a $1.8 billion first-quarter earnings showing. His fixed-income, currency and commodities traders virtually doubled their top line from what was a tough period for the industry last year, confirming that their chief rival made a mess of the first three months of the year. Morgan Stanley’s 96 percent jump in fixed-income trading was easily the best of the batch of Wall Street’s bulge-bracket results. Bank of America, Citi and JPMorgan each boosted their comparable division’s revenue just shy of a fifth, which

Jefferies just gave Wall Street a bit of reassurance. The investment bank housed inside the $9 billion conglomerate Leucadia National revealed that it more than doubled revenue in the three months ended Feb. 28 thanks to its fixed-income trading and underwriting operations. The first batch of 2017 results suggests that with the Federal Reserve’s tightening and the yield curve steepening, trading engines across the industry should be firing on many cylinders. Buying and selling stocks and bonds alike powered the performance at Jefferies. Revenue from the business nearly septupled, to $379 million from a year ago. The business of advising

New York may have recently placed second behind London in consultancy Z/Yen’s annual ranking of global financial centres, but Donald Trump could help it regain top spot. Comments on Nov. 10 from the property magnate’s new website, which will map out his transition to the presidency, reaffirmed his campaign-trail commitment to financial deregulation, including a refashioning of Dodd-Frank post-crisis banking reforms. True, it remains uncertain whether this is good for the largest banks. The president-elect thinks Dodd-Frank fails working people, by making big banks bigger and hindering smaller competitors. Trump sees the latter as key drivers of economic growth, while