Author Archives: Felix

Will commercial mortgages of the 2007 vintage turn out to be as misguided as residential mortgages in 2006? Fitch Ratings thinks there’s a serious risk of that. Does this sound familiar to you? The phenomenon has granted borrowers easy access … Continue reading →

$40 million seems to be the going rate for an investment-bank CEO these days. Executive compensation expert Graef Crystal has done the math, and finds that the pay for Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs; Stanley O’Neal of Merrill Lynch; John … Continue reading →

Subscribers to the New York Times got an extra section to throw away unread this morning: DealBook, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s M&A-obsessed blog, now has a quarterly spin-off on paper. The Spring 2007 section is full of mildly fluffy articles about … Continue reading →

Peter Scaturro knows private banking. And when Nationsbank Bank of America bought the company he ran, US Trust, they thought they were buying his private-banking expertise at the same time. Think JP Morgan buying Bank One for Jamie Dimon, or … Continue reading →

Just how big is the Blackstone IPO? Over at DealJournal, Dana Cimilluca calls it “the biggest initial public offering since Google”. But in fact it’s much bigger than that. Check out Renaissance Capital’s league table of the biggest US IPOs … Continue reading →

Blogger Fred Wilson (oh, OK, he’s a venture capitalist too) has sold his West Village townhouse for $33.15 million, a downtown record. He bought it for $7.35 million in 2000. And the rest of Manhattan’s property market is still booming, … Continue reading →

For reasons I don’t pretend to understand, Credit Suisse and UBS — the two big Swiss banks — are also the two big international heavyweights in the world of Latin American equities. Recently, UBS beefed up its presence in Brazil … Continue reading →

I spent a very large chunk of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, sitting in my living room, watching the television, which told me nothing I didn’t already know. I spent a very large chunk of the following week reading hundreds of … Continue reading →

Have you been scratching your head, wondering why public companies, which drove US economic growth for decades, are rapidly being taken private — a seemingly backward step? I haven’t seen any really compelling explanation of this, but I’m beginning to … Continue reading →

Gabriel Kahn of the WSJ has a big front-page article datelined Milan today, on how it’s hard out there for a major Italian industrialist, what with having to deal with interference from the government all the time. Mr. Tronchetti Provera’s … Continue reading →

Sam Zell is providing equity in his bid for Tribune, and he’s certainly taking it private. What’s more, as we’ve seen, he’s loading Tribune up with the kind of debt load normally seen only in deals run by private-equity companies. … Continue reading →

Do you ever get the impression that risk just goes around in circles? I’m relatively sanguine about a lot of the risk being created in the financial system right now largely because so much of the risk has been moved … Continue reading →

Remember that list of banks involved in KKR’s bid for First Data? Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch are all going to be lending KKR money to lever up the target company. And … Continue reading →

What was the biggest US IPO of 2007 so far? You don’t know off the top of your head? No matter — you can just pop over to MarketWatch, which has a whole story on Q1 IPOs, headlined “IPOs fatten … Continue reading →

Are all private markets slowly being eclipsed? Private equity shops are buying up public companies faster than ever, with today’s KKR-First Data deal being only the latest. But it’s not only equities which are moving into the privately-owned twilight: it’s … Continue reading →

Coca-Cola. Great company. Must have great executives, right? The Carlyle Group certainly thinks so: Carlyle Group is on Monday expected to announce the hiring of Coca-Cola’s most senior executive in Asia to spearhead regional investments across consumer-related businesses. I wonder … Continue reading →

The WSJ has a big article today on the demand in investment banks for big NYC trading floors. Apparently the new Goldman Sachs tower in Battery Park City will have no fewer than six trading floors, each of a very … Continue reading →

The NYT’s David Carr can certainly provide a punchline: Last summer, I needed some gadgets for a multimedia project, so I walked in to a Best Buy. A young man walked me around the floor, assembling a bag of components … Continue reading →

It’s not just Sam Zell who’s throwing the leverage around. If you think his $11 billion in new debt is excessive, just you wait until you see the size of the credit line that KKR will have lined up for … Continue reading →

Sam Zell wanted to buy the Tribune Company for $33 a share, putting in $300 million of his own money. But somehow Tribune managed to engineer a bidding war — an impressive feat, given that virtually nobody really wanted to … Continue reading →