CIMB Takes Aggressive Investment Bank Actions

CIMB is one of Malaysia large and highly rated banks (several Malaysian banks have yet to fall prey to the level of problems those in Europe and the USA have). Investment banking is a very tricky area. There are huge unnecessary profits to banks such as Goldman Sachs taking from the current investment banking situation (which is just a lousy system that pours billions into a few banks for activities not worth close to what they take).

However the USA and European banks have often set up compensation structures that encourage bad risks, and bad pricing, and bad service to customers. If CIMB falls into that trap they almost certainly would fall to the same problems all other investment banks have fallen to – which required massive taxpayer funded bailouts.

Hopefully CIMB is not going into the gambling with huge leverage aspect of “investment banking” that most of the USA and European companies have made the main factor in their operations.

If CIMB just takes a simple approach to managing investment financing deals they can take huge profits and give customers huge savings off the current lousy deals they are offered by the current limited investment banking options. I would be worried though. The temptations to create huge cash incentives that will result in the company taking on huge risks and undermining customers have been impossible for most investment banks to avoid. If the investment bank is attached to a normal bank then you run into all sorts of risks of taxpayer funded bailouts.