For decades, General Electric was happy to reap the enormous profits that arose from its finance arm as it swelled into one of the country’s biggest lenders.

GE will beign by selling $26.5 billion worth of real estate assets, G.E. is hastening to return to its roots as one of the mightiest industrial companies in the world, whose operations include jet engines, oil drilling equipment and medical devices. What it will mostly shed is GE Capital, a lender with hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of assets.

The move announced Friday reflects the shifting landscape of the financial world, especially for the largest players. They face greater regulatory scrutiny and calls from analysts and investors to slim their operations or break up. Some are shifting their focus to areas like wealth management as traditional activities like trading prove less profitable. It is no surprise that G.E. decided to re-evaluate its role in this ecosystem.

The divestiture campaign, code-named Hubble within G.E. and put together in about six weeks, will erase one of the main legacies of the conglomerate’s vaunted former chief executive, John F. Welch Jr. But it is also a recognition that manufacturing, not finance, represents the company’s future.

“We’re not sentimentalists,” Jeffrey R. Immelt, the multinational’s current chairman and chief executive, said in an interview.

G.E.’s expansive campaign will bring other changes as well. In shrinking its far-flung empire, the company will also bring back $36 billion in cash that now resides overseas, taking a $6 billion tax hit in the process. And it will also press to relieve itself from the burdens of being considered a too-big-to-fail lender, a status that brings stricter regulatory requirements.

The wide range of asset sales will help finance a huge return of money to shareholders, which G.E. estimates will eventually reach $90 billion. About $50 billion will come from a stock repurchase, one of the biggest on record.

For years, the financial tilt looked smart and relatively easy. In an interview in 2010, Jeffrey  Immelt recalled, if a deal looked like a moneymaker, it got the nod. “And you don’t have to build a factory,” he said.

Yet the big bet on finance badly wounded G.E. after Lehman’s demise, when the market upheaval left the conglomerate hard-pressed to borrow debt for its day-to-day operations.

In March, the Federal Reserve and thirty-one US bank holding companies announced the results of the latest Dodd-Frank mandated stress tests.   Somehave arguedthat that the bank holding companies have strong incentives to mimic the Fed’s stress test results, since the Fed’s results are an integral part of the Federal Reserve’s supervisory assessment of capital  adequacy for these firms.  Stress Tests- Dodd Frank versus US Fed

Dodd Frank Stess Test 2015

Peter Schroeder and Vicki Needham write:  With an interest rate hike looming, the Federal Reserve’s credibility is on the line.

Chair Janet Yellen has professed unflinching confidence in the Fed’s ability to steer policy back to normal. That confidence will now be put to the test as the central bank sifts through a pile of economic data to find the right time to act

The big question at the Fed is when to pull the trigger on the first interest rate increase since 2006.

Yellen has said “policymakers cannot wait until they have achieved their objectives to begin adjusting policy.”

“Doing so would create toogreat a risk of significantly overshooting both our objectives … potentially undermining economic growth and employment,” she warned.

And while the unemployment rate is one of the most prominent measures of economic health, the Fed has to rely on many other pieces of competing data to form the most complete picture it can.

The unemployment rate used to be the only number you had to look at. Now of course there are many dimensions.

How smoothly Yellen is able to steer through the first interest rate hike in nearly a decade could significantly affect the brewing debate in Congress about altering how the Fed operates.

For years, Republicans have criticized the Fed’s extremely accommodative policy, arguing it is sowing the seeds of damaging inflation and encouraging bad habits in financial markets.

Diane Swonk, chief economist of Mesirow Financial, said Yellen and Fed officials are cognizant of the political pressure as they try to lay a path for a smooth series of rate increases.

That pressure stems from the Fed’s move to stop the collapse of AIG and Lehman Brothers as the 2008 financial crisis took hold.

“The Fed has zero experience with doing what they’re doing right now because they’ve never done it before,” said Andrew Busch, editor of the political and financial newsletter The Busch Update.

Historically, Busch said, the Fed has acted late. The concern now, he said, is that the Fed will ultimately get too aggressive and go too far.

Prominent Republicans in both chambers have indicated that they will pursue some form of Fed reform, whether it be tying the bank to a formal monetary policy rule, changing the number of Fed districts nationwide or reforming how the system is audited.

If an interest rate increase leads to havoc in financial markets, it could lead to some “I told you so” from Fed skeptics who have criticized its decisions for years.

At its last policy meeting, the Fed updated its policy statement to remove language saying it would be “patient” in raising rates. At a subsequent press conference, Yellen emphasized that the change did not suggest a rate hike was imminent but that the central bank was beginning to monitor the landscape for the appropriate moment to do so. She ruled out a rate hike when the Fed next sets policy in April.

Like Bernanke, Yellen has exuded steadfast confidence in the Fed’s ability to raise rates without disrupting the overall economy. But now her reputation as an expert among experts will be put to the test.

Some  Fed-watchers believe the reform chatter will remain just that, because many policymakers ultimately will want to leave the steering of the economy to an independent central bank.

Emirates NBD bank hot in social media:  Emirates NBD, Dubai’s largest lender, has been ranked 25th in the world for social media in 2014, the best performance by a bank based in the Middle East.

Compiled by The Financial Brand, a USA-based online publication, its Power 100 is the only like-for-like ranking of banks’ success rate in social media platforms.

Additionally, the bank was ranked 29 on the Top 100 banks on Twitter with over 41,000 followers, and 14 for most all-time YouTube views, in the independent survey that calculates ranking based on Facebook ‘likes,’ Facebook ‘engagement rate,’ Twitter followers, Tweets sent, YouTube views and YouTube subscribers.

Neil Halligan writes: Shayne Nelson head of the NBD bank announced income was up 22 percent to $3.9bn and net profit increased by 58 percent, to $1.38bn.

In what was reportedly one of the shortest AGMs in the bank’s recent history, shareholders approved an increased cash dividend of 35 fils per share.

A 36-year veteran of the banking industry, the Perth native admits his intended career path almost didn’t happen before it started, when he missed his stop for an interview with ANZ Bank.

From bank teller to CEO, Nelson has been involved in most parts of the banking industry, firstly in Australia and later in Asia, when he moved between Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia with Standard Chartered, before taking over as CEO of its Middle East and North Africa business.  He took over at  Emirates NBD a year ago. .

Emirates NBD’s recent conservative approach means that it can cope with any potential headwinds.

“Competition is quite tough,” he admits, “but we have scale and that’s one of the big advantages that we have in the UAE, with our branch network, our loan size, our ATM network, our point of sale, and so on. We have the right mix of business between consumer and wholesale,” he adds.

And he’s also added a few products in the bank’s treasury platform to tap into some fee-earning business that foreign banks had been capitalising on.

While the results and the changes that he put in place have all been positive for Emirates NBD, Nelson does have a number of concerns, including the price of oil and the effect on liquidity.

The Al Etihad Credit Bureau has been widely welcomed by the banking industry, including Nelson, who says banks will be able to “price the risk a lot better”, but he warns there could be a drop in consumer loan demand, and therefore spending as well, as banks “get to know what they didn’t know” about their customers.