Grok Wants to Hire You, HSBC Wants to Cut Jobs

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Everything is converging — banking’s outlook, private credit market concerns, artificial intelligence, job security and of course the war.

Elon Musk, who has knack for converging disparate things, has plans for his Grok AI to hire Wall Street bankers, private lenders, portfolio managers, traders and credit analysts, to make the chatbot better at finance. One can only imagine where this will lead; given Grok’s affinity for pulling off everyone’s clothing, perhaps it will engage in asset stripping. But perhaps, too, Grok will digest all the known facts about finance and solve the big dilemma for bankers in private markets: Are they dealing with bad assets, or just bad prices?

European leaders at UBS Group, Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank publicly volunteered that there’s little to worry about among their private credit holdings. This dovetails with Bill Dudley’s assessment in Bloomberg Opinion that the situation is bad but not 2008 bad. (Some of the stuff being peddled really is pretty bad, according to Pimco, which wants to see the asks converge closer to bids before it becomes a big buyer.) Wall Street lenders had better hope that bids converge with their aspirations as they try to offload LBO debt to a wary market. UniCredit and Commerzbank might literally converge if Andrea Orcel’s takeover bid succeeds.

While private markets are moving toward more disclosure, as we noted in prior weeks, now public markets are moving toward less disclosure — regulators will consider letting some firms cut back on quarterly reporting. If you were a full Terminal subscriber (you’re still not?), you’d know that Bloomberg Intelligence has discounted the idea that fewer public reports would give stock pickers an edge over indexers. Based on data from the UK where semiannual reporting is common, BI says, “active managers have underperformed even more than in the US.”