Opening Bell: 05.13.10
CEO Pay Breaks Glass Ceiling as Bartz Gets $47.2 Million With '09 Bonanza (Bloomberg)
Anyone gonna give her shit for it? Inquiring minds at 200 West Street would like to know.
Moynihan Becomes Obama's Top Wall Street Ally on Financial-Rules Overhaul (Bloomberg)
One of Moynihan’s assets may be that he is a fresh face. He took over as the bank’s CEO Jan. 1, and unlike his predecessor, Kenneth Lewis, isn’t tainted by public outrage over the $700 billion bailout for banks. Nor has he been targeted by a Securities and Exchange Commission suit -- now settled -- alleging that investors were misled about bonuses and losses during Bank of America’s 2009 acquisition of Merrill Lynch & Co.
Louis Bacon decries European 'demonisation' of hedge funds (FN)
LB: “European financial authorities see hedge funds particularly as a threat to their ability to contain prices, information and confidence in their increasingly risky sovereign debt markets. Witness their demonisation of hedge funds in the market even after the Greeks were found to be lying about their deficit data.”
Banker Says She Was Fired For Questioning Account (NYT)
A former private banker at JPMorgan Chase & Company has sued the bank, claiming that she was fired after alerting superiors to possibly questionable dealings by a top client. The former banker, Jennifer Sharkey, said in a complaint filed in United States District Court in Manhattan on Monday that she was let go as a vice president and wealth manager in August 2009, six days after formally raising the concerns.
Big borrower California won't slip like Greece (Reuters)
That's the broadly held view in the $2.8 trillion U.S. municipal bond market, which is puzzled by analysts, columnists, cartoonists and bearish investors comparing Greece's fiscal floundering and $1 trillion bailout to hard-pressed U.S. states such as California and Illinois. "It's wacky," said municipal debt analyst Jeffrey Cleveland at Payden & Rygel. "Just look at the ratio of debt to state gross domestic product. It's 10 percent for California and somewhere between 104 percent and 150 percent for Greece."
Big TARP Banks Not Helping Small Businesses (CNBC)
Elizabeth Warren called it "infuriating" that the Troubled Asset Relief Program has not achieved its objective in funneling some of the $700 billion in appropriations to small businesses.