Category Archives: banking

BanXcard: Better Than Wal-Mart, Worse Than Credit Unions

I have mixed feelings about the BanXcard,
a new product which is indubitably better than the MoneyCard.
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Bear Stearns Funds: Still More Questions Than Answers

Back on Monday, I had a whole set of unanswered
questions
about the collapsed Bear Stearns hedge funds. Today, we got news
– but no answers to those questions. In fact, there are now more questions
than ever.
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The Barclays Catch-22

Dennis Berman talked to Barclays president Bob Diamond
today, and got this astonishing admission:
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Bear Stearns Needs English Lessons

What is it about banks that they find it impossible to write in English?
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Management-Speak, Mixed Metaphors Edition

Joseph Giannone, of Reuters, has a Q&A with UBS investment
bank CEO Huw Jenkins up on the web today.
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When Banks Diversify Internationally

Bloomberg is running a 2,000-word
story
today on how Bank of America and other banks with little in the way
of international diversification are likely to underperform the multinational
US banks this earnings season.
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Whither the UBS Investment Bank?

Maybe the attempt to grow the investment bank will turn out to be more theoretical than real. Rohner is a veteran of UBS’s buy side; it’s not yet clear that he has a lot of love or understanding for the sell-siders in New York.
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Wuffli Out at UBS

The UBS press
release
announcing "senior executive management changes" (aka
the firing of CEO Peter Wuffli) is a classic of the raises-more-questions-than-it-answers
genre.
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How Citi Reached the Top of the M&A League Tables

Maybe it’s not so surprising that Citi is now atop the M&A league tables: the league tables simply aren’t measuring advisory services any more.
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Why Bear Stearns Won’t Be Sold

The Bear Stearns rumors are back. "Bear
Stearns Could Become Takeover Target
," we’re breathlessly told, although
if you read all the way to the final four words of the article, you do find
out at the end that, for now at least, "Bear isn’t for sale."
Glad that’s cleared up.
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Diary of a Defenestration

June 27: "Bear
Stearns’ Asset Management Chief Takes Charge in Fund Crisis
"
is the headline as Rich Marin rides to the rescue of his company’s
embattled hedge funds.
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What Jimmy Cayne Eats For Breakfast

Red wine for breakfast.
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Bear’s Funds’ Problems: Not All That Big

The more we learn about what happened at Bear Stearns, the more overblown all the worries seem to have been.
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A Plea to Jamie Dimon for Great Architecture

It’s quite sad that for all Wall Street’s wealth, no New York bank has in living memory managed to build an architecturally distinguished building.
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Propping Up the Blackstone Share Price

It turns out
that those 20 million extra Blackstone shares that the lead managers sold
on Monday
didn’t necessarily make $234 million for Steve Schwarzman personally
after all. The point of a greenshoe, it seems, is to help support the price
of the stock if it falls below the offering price – as BX, of course,
did
on Tuesday.
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Lloyd Blankfein, Man of the People

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein came
out as a Democrat
today, aligning himself with Robert Rubin
and Jon Corzine rather than with Hank Paulson.
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Bear Stearns Funds: Is Everything OK Now?

After throwing the entire financial media (if not the actual markets) into a week-long tizzy, Bear Stearns seems to have found a way to stabilize things without committing too much of its own money and without subjecting its funds’ prime brokers to any losses.
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Blackstone Deserted By Its Own Bankers

If you have seventeen different underwriters on a deal, and they all say that a certain stock is worth (say) $31 per share, there’s bound to be a pretty strong bid at that level. Right?
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Will China Prevent the CDO Meltdown?

If fund managers don’t look down, maybe they won’t fall.
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Bear Stearns: Takeover Speculation Returns

Color me unconvinced for the time being: if Bear has remained independent this long, I doubt a dodgy hedge fund or two will constitute its undoing.
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The Bear Bailout: A Plea for Transparency

Now that the public gets its financial information from an incredibly wide range of sources, it’s becoming less and less useful for banks and other financial entities to talk only to a small number of media sources.
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Bear Stearns: The Satire Begins

That Euromoney award to Bear Stearns for Best
Risk Management
? It’s real.
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Blackstone: The First of Many Private Equity IPOs

Take $170 million from taking Blackstone public, another $200 million or so from KKR, and a few hundred million more from Apollo and TPG and Carlyle and everybody else who’s looking to IPO – and soon you’re talking real money.
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Will the Prime Brokers Lose Money on the Bear Stearns Funds?

There’s a very scary tidbit hidden at the bottom of the NYT
coverage
of the Bear Stearns mortgage mess today:
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Is Citigroup Too Big?

If a strong leader could communicate a simple and effective vision for the company, the calls for its breakup would soon cease.
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