SMFG seen eyeing Goldman as Japan shops on Wall St

Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, Japan's No. 3 bank, plans to invest in Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Japanese media said, in what would be the third big Japanese investment this week on Wall Street.
SMFG said the bank had no deal in place at the moment but media said it wanted to join the list of Japanese financial firms using the upheaval in the United States to aggressively expand abroad.
The purchases, including a big stake in Morgan Stanley and the Asian and European assets of failed Lehman Brothers, are a major turnaround for Japanese banks that were nearly crushed by bad loans just a few years ago and needed massive injections of public cash to stay afloat.
Late on Tuesday, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc agreed to invest $5 billion in Goldman Sachs, a big boost for the Wall Street bank from the world's best-known investor, but a Goldman spokesman said he could not confirm the report SMFG would follow suit.
SMFG's investment in Goldman Sachs would total several hundred billion yen, Kyodo news agency said, while the Nikkei business daily said the bank would consider investing up to 100 billion yen ($946 million).
SMFG played down the reports, which both cited unnamed sources.
"At this point, it is not true that we've decided to invest in Goldman Sachs," said SMFG spokeswoman Chika Togawa, who declined to comment further.
In a broader rally of financial stocks, shares of SMFG finished up 1.2 percent at 684,000 yen, compared with a 0.1 percent decline in Tokyo's broad TOPIX share average.
"If they take a big position in Goldman, you can definitely say it would be a positive over the medium- to long-term," said Mitsushige Akino, chief fund manager at Ichiyoshi Investment Management.
"If they take a big enough position so that they can benefit from Goldman's know-how and human resources, it will be positive."
Once considered too naive and cautious for the high-risk, high-return world of investment banking, cash-rich Japanese firms have largely avoided the huge credit losses of the subprime mortgage crisis, leaving them well-placed to pick up the best assets from the carnage on Wall Street.