The 1980s supermodel Linda Evangelista once said. “We don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day.” That seems to be the motto of American bankers, (save Citigroup’s Andrew Hall, who needs 40 times that much per business day). Not only do they not care about things banks used to deem as important, like playing […]
Read more...The most interesting aspect of the latest stage of the tempest-in-a-teapot over now famous Phibro trader Andrew Hall’s contract. which could reap him as much as $100 million in 2009, is that Citi appears to be girding itself for a fight with the government over it. This stance suggests several possibilities, which by the way […]
Read more...Well, Ken Rogoff does not do a Shakespearean turn, but he makes a badly needed observation in his latest piece at Project Syndicate, namely, that pinning a lot of blame for the crisis on the Lehman collapse is a faulty analysis. And he picks up a pet theme of ours, that patching up the system […]
Read more...Rolfe Winkler of Reuters and Louise Story of the New York Times sat in on the hearings on the SEC-Bank of America settlement today. Those who have followed this little drama may recall: Merrill paid its employees bonuses of $3.6 billion prior to the close of the deal with Bank of America. It was very […]
Read more...Today’s Financial Times highlights a possible target of regulatory action: bank overdraft fees. And those fees are not distributed the proverbial 80/20 pattern, with 20% of the accounts contributing 80% of the activity, but 90/10. And that 10%, not surprisingly, is in consumers with the lowest credit scores. And the biggest banks are the ones […]
Read more...Ahem, the story from The Hill on the ever rising tide of Federal budget deficits lists financial firm bailouts first as causes of the red ink, with falling tax receipts second. And the very same bailout recipients are crowing about their profitability. Now admittedly, the biggest contributors to the July increase were Fannie and Freddie, […]
Read more...At this point, the New York Times story reporting that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Goldman chief Lloyd Blankfein spoke frequently during the crisis is close to a “dog bites man” news item. After Goldman was the only Wall Street player involved in the discussions of what to do about the rapidly unravelling AIG, and […]
Read more...One of my (many) pet peeves is the lousy incentives that investment bank top brass and staff have had for some time. In particular, the advent of the “other people’s money” model has meant that everyone has reason to be cavalier. The industry has a proud tradition of people failing upwards, or at least sideways, […]
Read more...The SEC desire to self-fund, revealed in an interview of SEC chairman Mary Shaprio in an interview with the Financial Times, is a far bigger deal than it might appear. One of the reasons for the agency’s less than impressive performance in pursuing fraud is that Congress kept it starved. For instance, Arthur Levitt, SEC […]
Read more...The Merrill-Bank of America bonus row took an interesting turn. As readers may recall, Merrill paid bonuses prior to the closing of its purchase by Bank of America, which was earlier than they would have been issued had Merrill remained independent. That timeframe was also when Bank of America was threatening to break the deal, […]
Read more...As readers may recall, we and just about anyone who understood anything about financial firm supervision saw the stress tests as a complete and utter farce. The authorities had tea and cookies with the 19 banks and then talked about model outputs. The talks sometimes got heated, so were were supposed to take this as […]
Read more...The Treasury Department seems to be a wits’ end on several front. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Geithner said bad words to banking regulators to try to bring them to heel. A few weeks ago, Geithner also had a chat with bank executives about their failure to do much in the way of […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal reports that Timothy Geithner tongue-lashed Federal financial services regulators over their bucking the Obama Administration initiative for the Fed to become The One Regulator to Rule Them All. This comes on the heels of Congressional testimony which showed rather clearly that the key actors were not singing from the same hymnal. […]
Read more...We’ve grumbled at points during the process of throwing various lifelines out to the financial sector, that media has tended to focus unduly on the TARP (no doubt encouraged by the powers that be who are eagerly pushing “the banks are fine” line) at the expense of the vast net of additional subsidies. The ones […]
Read more...Submitted by Arthur Doyle, a managing director at Lehman Brothers until the summer of 2008. When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because […]
Read more...