As you may have heard, Wall Street is set to layoff a whole lot of financial services employees before the year is over. Last month the figure was pegged at around 100,000, although it got cranked up a notch on Friday when Bank of America said in September, it plans to tell 10,000 employees to pack up their shit and mosey on out. There’s a lot of fear, there’s a lot of panic, there’s a lot of “what am I going to do” going on. Well maybe what you should do is count your blessings. Count your blessings that you’re only potentially getting laid off, not being thrown in a dumpster and left for dead. Continue reading »
Archive for August 2011
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s former right-hand man has irrevocably destroyed 3500 unpublished files leaked to the whistleblower site including the complete US no-fly list, five gigabytes of Bank of America documents and detailed information about 20 neo-Nazi groups. Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who left WikiLeaks last year after a falling out with Assange, revealed the document destruction in an interview with Der Spiegel. [The Age, earlier]
Remember when Duff McKagan said he was going to start managing money? To recap, back 1994, while recovering from a ruptured pancreas, the Guns ‘N Roses bassist was puttering around his basement when he happened upon GnR’s financials from the previous six years. Flipping through the reports he had a bit of a panic attack when he realized, “I couldn’t make sense of it. I didn’t know how much we had made or lost on the tour,” and got himself into even more of a tizzy when he though about admitting to someone, “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.” So he decided to take some finance classes at Santa Monica Community College and while fronting his new band, Velvet Revolver, started giving financial advice on the side. After “word started spreading that he knew something about managing money” and Duff was taking calls from his musician friends asking him about “everything from whether to buy a house to where they should invest their money,” he realized a coupla things. 1) That he was pretty good at this money management stuff and 2) fellow musicians were comfortable being counseled by him because he didn’t “wear a suit” and therefore wasn’t representative of The Man. And that’s when a lightbulb went off. Continue reading »
Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion In Loans From Fed (Bloomberg)
Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s unprecedented effort to keep the economy from plunging into depression included lending banks and other companies as much as $1.2 trillion of public money, about the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages. The largest borrower, Morgan Stanley, got as much as $107.3 billion, while Citigroup took $99.5 billion and Bank of America $91.4 billion, according to a Bloomberg News compilation of data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, months of litigation and an act of Congress. “These are all whopping numbers,” said Robert Litan, a former Justice Department official who in the 1990s served on a commission probing the causes of the savings and loan crisis. “You’re talking about the aristocracy of American finance going down the tubes without the federal money.”
Bernanke Ready For Action, But When Is In Doubt (MarketWatch)
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is expected to use his highly anticipated speech from Jackson Hole, Wyo. to stress that he is willing to ride to the rescue to stabilize the economy. When, is a different matter…NYU economist professor Mark Gertler said all options are on the table, including another round of asset purchases, or quantitative easing. In the first round of bond purchases between Dec. 2008 and March 2010, the Fed bought $1.7 trillion of mostly mortgage securities, and in the second round between November and June, the central bank snapped up $600 billion of Treasury bonds. “QE3 is an option if there is a significant downturn in the economy or extraordinary stress in financial markets,” Gertler said.
Libyan Rebels Seize Most Of Tripoli (WSJ)
Libyan rebels seized control over most of Tripoli on Monday amid scenes of jubilation, a day after surging into the city’s center and meeting little resistance from Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s defenses, though heavy clashes were reported at Col. Gadhafi’s compound and the leader’s whereabouts remained unknown.
ICC, Libya rebels discuss handover of Gaddafi’s son Saif (Reuters)
The International Criminal Court said on Monday it was in talks with the Libyan rebels about the potential transfer of Saif al-Islam, the son of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, to the war crimes court in The Hague. “We are in discussions with the Libyan council about the surrender of Saif al-Islam,” ICC official Fadi el-Abdallah said. “It is simply too early to talk about details of those discussions or timeframes. The situation is not fully clear or stable in Tripoli so that might take some time.”
Merkel Says She’ll Resist Pressure For Eurobond (Bloomberg)
“At this time — we’re in a dramatic crisis — euro bonds are precisely the wrong answer,” Merkel said in an interview with ZDF television in Berlin yesterday. “They lead us into a debt union, not a stability union. Each country has to take its own steps to reduce its debt.”
Strauss-Kahn Case Said To Be Set For Dismissal (NYT)
Three months after authorizing Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s swift indictment after his arrest on sexual assault charges, the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., has decided to ask a judge to dismiss the case, a person briefed on the matter said on Sunday. Continue reading »
$$$ Hedge Funds Most Bearish Since 2009 (Bloomberg)
$$$ “Let’s be very clear, there are some fundamental worries,” Goldman Sachs senior investment strategist Abby Joseph Cohen told CNBC Friday. “But our feeling is the valuation of the U.S. stock market is already pricing in a rather ugly scenario.” (CNBC)
$$$ Pimco Sees Commodities Rising, Sticks with Oil (Reuters)
$$$ Matthew Goldstein: The Madness Of Wall Street (Reuters)
$$$ Bloomberg’s Tom Keene: “Ken Prewitt and I do the show, and I have breakfast during the nine o’clock hour. A classic kind of Winston Churchill breakfast: scrambled eggs, sausage, English muffin toasted twice, home fries. And I eat about half that because I’m on live. So, I can be talking about Euro, Yen, or the president’s economic policy, and I got a sausage in my mouth.” (Grub Street) Continue reading »
Remember how Carl Icahn’s going to buy Clorox? Neither do Clorox shareholders, with the stock trading at $64, more or less where it was before he announced his $76.50 offer (later revised to $80). And with no committed financing, a swift rejection (accompanied by a poison pill) from the board, and a little bit of market turmoil, you could forgive him if he wanted us all to forget about his offer to escrow $6.2 billion to show his seriousness.
But you can’t just tell Carl Icahn to buzz off without facing the consequences. And he made the consequences clear when he made his $80 offer: Continue reading »
This is BofA Director of Public Policy James Mahoney making the offer:
Paulson made a surprise disclosure in May that he started buying Hewlett-Packard shares during the early part of 2011. His Paulson & Co. hedge fund is hardly known for plowing money into tech stocks, so the buying binge was eye-opening. … Unfortunately for Paulson and other investors, H-P shares have been clobbered in 2011, even before today’s decline. Based on back of the envelope math, Paulson’s paper loss on H-P is more than $500 million. [Deal Journal]
In these volatile times it helps to have role models to steer you through economic uncertainty, wise investors who you can look to when your faith in markets is shattered. And that sort of wisdom is hard to find right now, what with John Paulson continuing to trip over his own feet and George Soros closing up shop / apparently not having the resources to house all of his girlfriends in the manner to which they are accustomed. Fortunately, Roll Call today brings us a new list of investors for you to emulate: the 50 richest members of Congress.
Would you believe that millionaires who are able to direct stimulus funds to their own companies and unconstrained by insider trading laws had a pretty good year in 2010? Then you would be correct. Our 50 richest members of Congress had an average net worth of $32mm, and saw a weighted average growth in their net worth of 17.7% (unweighted 26%).* The S&P was up 12.8%. Continue reading »
Apparently the Queen has had to let some people go. Continue reading »
If yes, did you get the plain boring old one or the one with the tassels? Continue reading »
