Opening Bell: 03.08.10
AIG Agrees to Sell Alico to MetLife for $15.5 Billion (Bloomberg)
MetLife will pay $6.8 billion in cash and $8.7 billion in equity securities for American Life Insurance Co., the buyer said today in a statement. “This is a sizeable transaction,” Robert Haines, an analyst at CreditSights Inc. in New York, said in an interview before the deal was announced. “It demonstrates they’re making some tangible progress on their plan to divest assets.”
Hedge fund ranking reveals nasty scars from financial crisis (Pensions And Investments)
Hedge fund assets of three prominent firms — Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Renaissance Technologies Corp. and Citadel Investment Group — fell below the $20 billion cutoff, dropping the three from the ranking.
Battle Inside Fed Rages Over Bank Regulation (WSJ)
Cat fight: "Fissures at the central bank boiled over last year in a meeting in the boardroom of a Fed branch office in Memphis. The presidents of the regional banks, which dot the country from Boston to San Francisco, complained to Fed Vice Chairman Donald Kohn that the Fed's Washington bank-supervision group was adrift and not providing the district banks needed guidance on how to navigate a worsening banking crisis. Soon, though, Washington was more involved than ever. In one example: The Atlanta Fed was subjected to an especially thorough critical review of its performance as a regulator because of the large number of bank failures in the Southeast."
Citi's Gary Shedlin goes to Morgan Stanley (NYP)
The chairman of Citigroup’s global Financial Institutions Group will join Morgan Stanley as a vice chairman,
Why Does JPMorgan Trade at Book Value? (Reuters)
BreakingViews would like to know.
Awareness Rises, but Women Still Lag in Pay (NYT)
Finnish companies in the sample had the largest proportion of female chief executives, with 13 percent, followed closely by Norway and Turkey with 12 percent and Italy and Brazil with 11 percent.
In Zurich, Animals May Have Laywers (MarketWatch)