News

The collective value of Luxembourg investment funds has plunged more than 800 billion euro from record levels reached a year ago as inflation, rising interest rates and the war in Ukraine took their toll on assets domiciled in the grand duchy.

Jan Kemper will step down as chief financial officer and chief operating officer of German neobank N26, he announced in a post on social media. He only joined the challenger bank in July 2021. 

N26, one of Europe’s fastest-growing fintechs with more than eight million clients, is partly owned by Luxembourg-based venture capital firm Ilavska Vuillermoz Capital. Ilavska is among a range of VC firms who collectively have invested 1.8 billion euro in N26.

JPMorgan Asset Management plans to convert a number of active mutual funds in the US to passive ETFs next year. The asset manager is not alone. Globally, passive is starting to catch up with active.

One might have thought Luxembourg’s real estate market was doing well compared to other European cities, but for a long time, exact comparative numbers weren’t available. That’s all changed with the release of a new property index covering Luxembourg, the result of an 18-month long labour-intensive and expensive project.

The Luxembourg Stock Exchange has admitted China International Capital Corporation as a new trading and listing member with immediate effect. CICC will enable the indirect trading of shares listed on Shanghai the Shenzen stock exchanges via the Luxembourg bourse.

The Federal Reserve last night raised the target range for the federal funds rate by 50 basis points to 4.25-4.5 percent, rounding off a cumulative tightening of 425 basis points this year.

Total assets under management in Europe amounted to 28,400 billion euro by the end of September, reflecting a decline of about 12 percent from year-end 2021 levels as bond and stock markets fell amid rising inflation and interest rates and slowing economic growth following the outbreak of war in Ukraine.

Supervisory practices in Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands “appeared insufficient” during the years that Brexit pushed financial services away from the United Kingdom to EU member states, a peer review among European financial supervisors has found. Luxembourg’s supervisor disagrees with the review’s conclusions.

German judges handed down an important verdict this week: EU treaties are no obstacle to shared debt in the union. The ruling comes shortly after the European Commission called for new joint injections into the economy. “As an investor I would carefully reconsider my bond portfolio,” one critic warns.

On Tuesday, the German constitutional court in Karlsruhe ruled that “exceptional” EU loans to overcome problems caused by the Covid-19 pandemic do not violate European treaties.

Markets for depositary and custodian banking services in Luxembourg are “heavily concentrated”, with the top ten banks holding more than three quarters of all assets, the first ever survey on depositary and custodian services in the grand duchy shows.