Hey-ooo, anyone need a job? Maria Bartiromo reports that everyone’s favorite Dollar Dominatrix is leaving employer Oppenheimer and breaking out on her own and she needs enterprising minions like yourselves! The shop, officially called Meredith Whitney Advisors, will be up and running by early March. It’ll start out with research, investment banking and capital markets activity will soon follow and then, the world. Obviously the full service shop will provide a lengthy number of services you won’t find anywhere else. Interested? Must hate Citi, and have an open mind re: spreaders, truss bars, and the like. Apply today. (It’s a start up, so you’ll need to provide your own testicle clamps.)
Archive for February 2009
The word “restructuring” has apparently shifted in meaning. Now, it seems, the term is defined as “the light and noise accompanying the inter-atmospheric breakup of a probably doomed firm.”
MBIA Inc., the world’s largest bond insurer, is separating its municipal bond unit into a new operation as it looks to rebuild a business shattered by the subprime mortgage crisis.
The plan met with a mixed reaction on Wednesday. Because the unit could win new business for MBIA, shareholders cheered the move and sent the company’s shares up 33 percent in mid-day trading.
But rating agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded the company’s main insurance unit to three steps above junk and rated the new unit “AA minus,” citing “uncertain business prospects.”
Apparently, the light is sufficiently pretty and the noise sufficiently melodic, as the stock is enjoying a revival.
MBIA shifts bond insurance business to new company [Reuters]
I don’t think you people truly understood what Goldman Sachs was giving up when it said good-bye to co-prez Jon Winkelried last night.
That’s what happens when you leverage your Goldman stock to buy “alternative investments.” Now your Goldman stock is down 60%+ in two years, the hedge funds you bought have taken a similar bath, you are facing margin calls of “tens of millions in some cases,” and Muffie Benson-Perella won’t return your calls.
The situation is liquid, even if your limited partnership interests are not.
As you know, we’ve been chronicling the financial services space’s Israel-Palestinian conflict, otherwise known as Gasparino v. Goldman Sachs. The catfight broke out last Thursday, when Chaz reported that GS had held a double top secret meeting hours after Geithner’s Congressional debut, the topic of conversation being a lack of confidence in T. Geith. Goldman Sachs called BS on the sit-down being a secret or about T-bone, Chaz said they were lying and should change their ticker to BS, and then Joe Kernan, in a successful effort to egg CG on, claimed that the bank’s spokesman, Lucas van Praag, had the distinction of being the only GS employee whose family’s story was the basis for The Sound Of Music. What would be next, we wondered with detached interest, only in so much that, as humans, we enjoy watching the time-honored tradition of Jewish and Italian mafias battling over Wall Street supremacy. But this morning, all was silent.
We should’ve known the silence was indicative a bomb about to be dropped, but, foolishly, we assumed we were in the presence of a ceasefire. And then, this: a surprise strike by Gasparino, so violent, we’re not sure how GS will recover. In fact, we don’t even know if something like this is legal, so if someone could weigh in, that’d be top notch:
Can you imagine anything more pointless than rushing to Antigua to try and salvage your deposits from an institution after the investigation is in full swing and the SEC has labeled the entire endeavor a fraud? What is left to do at that point? “Besiege” the offices, of course, as if there is a vault there, and you have only to wait them out until they provide you with the key to a safety deposit box that contains your pro-rata share of the loot.
The entire scene smacks of desperation, as if life savings were tied up in the bank’s coffers. And after Made-off, who in the world would deposit their life savings in a single institution?
The reverberations from Texas billionaire Sir Allen Stanford’s alleged $8bn fraud continued to spread on Wednesday, as Antiguan authorities attempted to calm panicked locals who had been queuing up to withdraw money from a Stanford-owned retail bank.
Depositors attempted to withdraw their money from the Bank of Antigua the day after Mr Stanford was charged by US securities regulators over a “massive” investment fraud through Stanford International Bank, the cricket bankroller’s Antigua-based offshore bank.
[...]
Mr Stanford’s operations in Venezuela and Panama have been similarly besieged, with hundreds of depositors attempting to withdraw their investments from local offices of SIB, Reuters reported.
And if there is no cash left? Well then, burn the witch! I think we’d actually pay good money to cover that. (Especially in Antigua). We kid… we kid. (We’re serious!)
Panicked Antiguans besiege Stanford bank [The Financial Times]
Or at least he most likely was on Monday. As previously mentioned, the $8 billion Man tried to get a flight from Houston to his vacay home in Antigua the other day but whether or not he was able to secure the getaway car was unclear. However, an intrepid reader-cum-citizen journalist has directed our attention to this Cessna 750 Citation X, registered to NetJets, which left Texas on Monday at 1:24 PM CST and landed in Antigua just under four hours later. Was it Stanny? I feel like it might be! (That or his butler, readying the gossamer pillows in anticipation of tears.) Of course, that was Monday, and he’s probably gone now, but that’s cool, it’s not like anyone was really putting his/her back into this anyway.
The mortgage assistance plan is at hand and, as has become the pattern with such programs of late, it is Bigger, Longer and Uncut when compared with the trial balloon proposals that were floating around the rumor mill. Also unsurprisingly, it seems to have found new use for Fannie and Freddie.
The plan will create a new program to help as many as 5 million homeowners refinance conforming loans owned or guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, according to a fact sheet released by the White House. Treasury will buy up to $200 billion of preferred stock in each of the housing companies, twice as much as previously pledged, the announcement said.
“It will give millions of families resigned to financial ruin a chance to rebuild,” Obama said in remarks prepared for delivery at 10:15 a.m. in Phoenix. “By bringing down the foreclosure rate, it will help to shore up housing prices for everyone.”
My favorite part is the incentives structure:
Companies that service mortgages will get $1,000 for each loan that’s modified, and as much as $1,000 for three years when the borrower stays current, the government said. Homeowners also are eligible for $1,000 annually for five years for remaining current on their loans, according to the plan.
Now, where is Barney Frank to ask homeowners why they have to be “bribed” to stay current?
Obama Sets $75 Billion Plan to Stem U.S. Foreclosures [Bloomberg]
Earlier: We Thought It Was Absurd Too, But It Turns Out That Obama Really IS Going To Pay Your Mortgage
Maybe! Or maybe that just what he wants us to think. David Faber reports that his sources in the private jet biz tell him the Stanford Financial founder’s secretary tried to score the cricket lover a jet to Antigua yesterday, one-way. No word on whether the transaction went through– apparently there was an issue regarding acceptable forms of payment– or if this story was leaked purely to throw us off the trail.
Earlier: Sir Stanford MIA
As you may know, the Maestro spoke at the Economic Club of New York yesterday, predicting that the present recession would “surely be the longest and deepest” since the one that crafted The Greatest Generation. (I know, I know, they’ve been insufferable ever since with their long walks to school up hill both ways through gray, dust bowl snow drifts. Now at least we have something to reply with. I mean seriously, you try going on without a flat screen TV after the BMW has been repossessed).
Answering a question after his speech on whether he would have done anything differently during his tenure as Federal Reserve chairman to try and prevent the housing bubble, Greenspan said, “I think it would be desirable to find a way to suppress asset bubbles. But I am skeptical that it can be done.”
But the spanner of the green didn’t stop there. He also told the Financial Times that bank nationalization may be inevitable. Oh, the humanity!
“It may be necessary to temporarily nationalise some banks in order to facilitate a swift and orderly restructuring,” he said. “I understand that once in a hundred years this is what you do.”
Recession will be worst since 1930s: Greenspan [Reuters]
Greenspan backs bank nationalisation [The Financial Times]
Another round of cuts is supposedly scheduled for this Friday at Bank of Amerillwide, heavily if not exclusively skewed toward (former) Merrill employees. Don’t know which groups, but if you happen to, get in touch.
