Word: commerzbank
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Some of the most prominent names in architecture have turned green, at least for selected projects. The three-sided Commerzbank headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany, is a major work by a renowned British architect, Sir Norman Foster. At 53 stories, it was until recently the tallest building in Europe. It is also one of the leafiest. All around its triangular interior atrium are gardens in the sky, set at different elevations, so that no worker is more than a few floors away from a sizable patch of greenery. "Building allows us to explore nature in a different way," says Jeremy Edmiston...
...Germany, where the bull market had bestowed "quiet reserves" - unrealized and unrevealed gains - upon insurers, enabling them to entice new policyholders with offers of 6% annual returns. Now most of Germany's 130 or so mutual insurers are carrying "quiet liabilities." "They're sort of in a trap," says Commerzbank analyst Marc Thiel. "They need cash for their maturing policies, but they can't cut the bonuses they offer customers or they'll lose business." Switzerland's insurers face a similar problem, and the government there responded by lowering the mandatory payout from 4% to 3%. German law says insurers...
Kirch?s empire is famously opaque and riddled with complicated corporate cross-holdings. "The whole Kirch group has various contracts with various players," says Rolf Elgeti, a strategist at Commerzbank Securities. "Nobody really knows what is actually going on." But if the dominoes begin to tumble, Kirch may have to give up significant parts of the conglomerate he built from scratch over more than four decades. And, should the controversy taint friends who helped him along the way, he may not be the only high-profile casualty. One of his staunchest backers is Edmund Stoiber, premier of Bavaria...
...Another possibility might be that Allianz would now extend a hand to Commerzbank. Unlike Allianz's takeover of Dresdner, where there is little overlap, merging two big banks has the attraction of instant cost savings as the two close down duplicate branches. More importantly, with Allianz's linkup with Dresdner, the German financial scene seems more and more like a three-legged stool: Allianz and Dresdner, Munich Re and HypoVereinsbank, and Deutsche Bank. With traditional banking taking a backseat to the more profitable business of asset management, Commerzbank seems isolated and may now be amenable to a deal. One thing...
...retire and then redistributing the savings into new technologies. It also figures it could save $300 million in 2003 on cost synergies, which amounts to 2% of the $15 billion a year it shells out for materials, services and logistics."You could probably manage that just by benchmarking," says Commerzbank analyst Peter Dupont. "If the new company finds that Arbed ships a provider's stuff for one price and Usinor for another, and there's no good reason for the difference, then the pressure will be high...