Going to the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado?
Posting :
Mark Whistler
:
08/20/2008
If you're headed to Denver for the DNC, here's a breakdown of the nightlife...
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Montreal: Far Away Is Closer Than You Think
Posting :
Travel
:
08/11/2008
When the grind of the trading desk has you itching to get on the road, you don't need to plan an escape of several weeks. For a quick weekend out of town or a longer retreat from the pressures daily life, Montreal may be the answer. Put yourself in a completely different environment for a little bit without turning your life upside down, and you'll find your sanity return in no time.
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BA-Iberia, Sittin’ In A Tree?
Article :
July 2008
For years, British Airways and Spain's Iberia have shadowboxed each other on the merger circuit. Nothing ever came of it. But with the economy in fits and fuel prices in the stratosphere, the two airlines are now reconsidering. Find out where things stand as the news breaks.
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Banks: Hot, Even When They’re Not?
Article :
July 2008
Or so it seems, as private-equity firms and hedge funds practically lick their lips with anticipation in cherry-picking choice banks that may have recently taken a beating, but still retain some polish. With the stocks of certain institutions rebounding, banks more interested in forging deals and regulators simultaneously easing the restrictions that have complicated such transactions in the past, here’s the who’s who of which banks are being isolated as top investment picks.
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Gulf Rush
Article :
July 2008
It’s no secret that anyone who’s anyone in banking, corporate law, private-equity, et all are seeking refuge from the subprime storm in the oil-rich (read: flat-out rich) Middle East. Yet many are finding such “suitcase-banking” is easier said than done in a deeply challenging environment where outsiders are shunned and entrenched players rule the roost. So, what’s an eager newcomer to do?
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New Schwab CEO
Article :
July 2008
The Board of Directors of The Charles Schwab Corporation today appointed Walter W. Bettinger II as president and chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors effective October 1, 2008.
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Where The Deals Are
Article :
July 2008
Blockbuster buyouts may be rare this year, but small remains beautiful. Here’s why action in the middle market has rarely been more brisk and how some savvy players are creatively mining it.
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Merrill’s Wrestling Match
Article :
July 2008
The challenger: Merrill. The opponent: Merrill. With John Thain at the helm, the New York Times gives this showdown two thumbs up, suggesting the bank’s CEO has never faced a fight he couldn't win. So, what's the prognosis for him winning this one? Good question.
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KKR Under Siege
Article :
July 2008
Here’s why protesters led by the Service Employees International Union are planning to camp out on the doorstep of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.'s New York headquarters today.
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J.P. Morgan’s 2Q Report Card Is In
Article :
July 2008
Bottom line, the nation's largest bank by market value made money. But key stats from the latest period highlight where Wall Street’s banks may continue to nurse their wounds for the rest of the year, or longer. In particular, earnings fell 53%, credit-loss provisions more than doubled to $3.45 billion (but dropped 22% from the first quarter), subprime-mortgage charge-offs quadrupled and the company's investment bank saw profits plunge by 67%, as did earnings from its credit-card business. For the full report – including how much more the bank wrote down of its leveraged-loan and mortgage-related securities – click here.
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SPACs: Back In The Fast Lane?
Article :
July 2008
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Advising the Rainmakers
Article :
July 2008
Every good merger, buyout, and takeover needs a publicity specialist behind it, and Gershon Kekst has been that go-to guy for almost four decades. He has recently sold his company to Paris-based Publicis Group to expand outside the US, but he sees the current merger environment as "frightening."
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Face-to-Face with a Polar Bear
Posting :
Travel
:
06/30/2008
The polar bear in the Central Park Zoo is far from reality. Sure you can get close, but a layer of glass obscures the view. You never get to become a part of the experience. The Travel Lab, on the other hand, puts you in the bear's natural habitat.
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Lehman Teams Up With LSE On ‘Dark Pool’ Trading Platform
Article :
June 2008
It’s no secret that in recent years the big banks have been more than eager to do deals with exchanges (or in competition with them) carving out trading pools in a global arena where exchanges are raking it in on trading volumes that rise, rain or shine. Here’s how the bank positioned itself to cash in when London Stock Exchange CEO Clara Furse found herself looking for a partner, plus a preview of what this new multilateral trading facility will be capable of.
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Where The Deals Are
Article :
June 2008
Blockbuster buyouts may be rare this year, but in our latest issue of Dealmaker magazine we discover small is still beautiful. Indeed, action in the middle market has rarely been more brisk and some savvy players are creatively mining it.
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Green House Effect
Article :
June/July 2008
Looking to buy a home and engage in some socially responsible investing? Look no further than the environmentally enlightened communities of coastal South Carolina.
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Spur of the Moment
Article :
June/July 2008
The new Bentley Flying Spur is a serious car -- for men who like
to drive seriously fast.
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Bonaire
Posting :
Travel
:
06/09/2008
Push yourself into tight spaces.
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Where the Deals Are
Article :
June/July 2008
Blockbuster buyouts may be rare this year, but small remains beautiful: Action in the middle market has rarely been more brisk, and some savvy players are creatively mining it.
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Lending a Hand
Article :
June/July 2008
When a deal is on the brink, Jimmy Lee, JPMorgan Chase's leveraged-loan ace and master negotiator, can bridge the gap.
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Inspiration and Perspiration
Article :
June/July 2008
Life has been a venture for Pitch Johnson and protégé Brook Byers.
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Capital Everybody Wants
Article :
May 2008
AIG CEO Martin Sullivan says that after raising more than $13 billion as of last week, the insurer now plans to drum up about $20 billion total to fight off two quarters’ worth of losses in the wake of the subprime debacle. He made his announcement today in London, where yet another company is scrambling to raise several billion to fund a takeover that it’s increasingly finding hard to handle.
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Turks and Caicos Islands: Feel Like "Belonging"?
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http://www.dealmakerdaily.com/travel/turkscaicos_belong.html
Turks and Caicos Islands: Feel Like "Belonging"?
Posting :
Travel
:
05/19/2008
"Belongers" is the local term for the native population, and if a stay on Grace Bay Beach makes you feel like you belong here as well, know that there's new island communities in the making on West Caicos and Ambergris Cays.
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Barclays’s Case Of The Mumbles
Article :
May 2008
If nature abhors a vacuum, then so, too, does the world of finance. Which may explain the disquiet surrounding Barclays’ first-quarter statement yesterday, muses the FT. In response to a fragile balance sheet – and on a day when the Fed chairman implored the finance sector to be “proactive” in raising capital – why the U.K. bank decided to do nothing.
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A Good Kind Of Bad?
Article :
May 2008
The good news: HSBC is setting aside $3.2 billion for cruddy loans it made in the U.S. The bad news: HSBC is setting aside $3.2 billion for cruddy loans it made in the U.S. Truth be told, this amount is less than what many had feared and expected, so we’re going to just go out on a limb here and say it’s a good kind of bad (you know…rather than the bad kind). Also, this duality of good/bad news happens to be arriving with a silver lining that, coming from Europe’s biggest bank, may bring hope back to all. Except, for course, for the U.S., which, HSBC notes, is doomed.
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Big Brother: Bigger Than Ever?
Article :
May 2008
The SEC is sick and tired of hearing that it supposedly messed up by falling asleep at the switch ahead of the subprime crisis. And now everyone is going to have to pay. We know the White House’s top economist also is on the case (Edward Lazear, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, is saying the U.S. is “not in a recession” and that "the data are pretty clear”) but no one is listening. A look at what investment banks likely will be forced to do differently in the future.
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Head Butler: Products - Cambodian Market Bags
Posting :
Jesse Kornbluth
:
05/02/2008
There will come a time when that question is as archaic as “Shall we take the flivver or the carriage?”
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Continental: From Frying Pan Into Fire?
Article :
April 2008
Just as all-business-class airline, EOS, files for Chapter 11 and crude oil prices shoot within a whisker of $120 a barrel, marking another record high, Continental washes its hands of formal talks with United Airlines’s parent company, UAL Corp. Bad timing – or does the Houston airline know something we don’t?
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Property Deals: Off The Block?
Article :
April 2008
How large real-estate deals poised for fruition in New York, Phoenix, Atlanta, Las Vegas – and now a massive, $7 billion downtown project in Seattle whose size would have rivaled five Empire State buildings – may now be headed for the scrap heap.
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Penthouse: Family Treasures
Article :
April 2008
How takeover tycoon Ira Rennert acquires trophy properties for his “spin-offs."
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Another Day, Another Cash Infusion
Article :
April 2008
National City Corp., Ohio's top bank and subprime lender, could seal a deal in a manner of hours with a buyout firm and a handful of shareholders to add a much-needed $7 billion to its balance sheet, people with knowledge of the situation told the Journal, the FT, B’berg, et all. To which we had only one question: how does JP Morgan fit into all this? We were heartened to learn we did not ask it in vain.
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Thain: Battling Bond Beraters
Article :
April 2008
After Merrill Lynch’s record loss of $7.8 billion last year, CEO John Thain has toiled to tame its risk management, sell heaps of equity to boost capital and contain any spreading malaise. But, in the run-up to the bank’s first quarter report this week, the bond market is thoroughly unconvinced – and its latest assessment is in.
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Penthouse
Article :
April/May 2008
Takeover tycoon Ira Rennert acquires trophy properties for his “spin-offs".
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Blackstone’s Jackpot
Article :
April 2008
With U.S. housing prices circling the drain, who wants to invest in real estate? $10.9 billion worth of investors do, that’s who. And that’s just at one firm. Here’s how the manager of the world’s biggest leveraged buyout fund plans to have a crack at this begging-for-it market.
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Help Save The World: (Part 2)
Posting :
Mark Whistler
:
04/01/2008
Please read on for Part II of this special article on how you can help save the world.
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Nice Day For It
Article :
April 2008
It may not have been Deutsche Bank’s intention to announce plans to write down $3.95 billion in the first quarter, just as UBS slammed the world with its blistering news today, but as far as timing goes, it was pitch-perfect. Why we reckon this likely will go over a bit more smoothly than, say, a Paulson-backed financial-system overhaul.
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Lehman: Perception Vs Reality
Article :
April 2008
If Lehman Brothers is shooting us straight on not really needing that $3 billion-plus it’s planning on raising anyway from a share sale, then it means that the perception of monsters under the bed on Wall Street is now officially scarier than the reality. Banks raising money they don’t need to reassure clients they probably don’t want who happen to have overactive imaginations? Zounds, the world we live in.
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UBS: The Other Shoe Drops
Article :
April 2008
Here’s the very quick hit: UBS Chairman Marcel Ospel won’t stand for re-election, effectively resigning, as the bank – one of Europe’s worst-hit by the subprime crisis – plans to write down another $19 billion and ask shareholders to green-light $15 billion in additional funds. A third-party sale or spin-off also is being considered, Chief Executive Marcel Rohner said in a conference call. So, who’s favored to succeed Ospel, and just how long does UBS have before its bread-and-butter private client base starts to flee in earnest? One thing is clear: This bank’s not giving up a single customer without a fight.
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Help Save the World: (Part 1)
Posting :
Mark Whistler
:
03/25/2008
In this special two-part article, readers will learn how one Wall Streeter is trying to bring free energy and food to the world, one impoverished community at a time.
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Steal From Cool-Hand Dimon’s Playbook
Article :
March 2008
"Jamie Dimon was in the right place at the right time and he pulled the trigger fast," notes an admirer to Bloomberg News. But it took the life lessons of another, more senior banker to help make JPMorgan’s CEO the fastest gun in town.
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BNP’s Back-Off
Article :
March 2008
In a statement on its Web site today, BNP Paribas says it no longer has merger designs on Societe Generale, marking the second time the latter has slipped from its hands. Only, in this instance, it looks as though BNP actually wanted it to. Here, the announcement.
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Head Butler - Movies - Manufactured Landscapes
Posting :
Jesse Kornbluth
:
03/14/2008
You want to see this movie --- you need to see this movie --- for many reasons, and scale is the first. We talk about global warming and environmental degradation and maybe we see a picture of an ice cap and a polar bear or a giant landfill, but we rarely see how big these things can be.
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Bank Write-Downs Overdone?
Article :
March 2008
The Federal Reserve is detecting the potential for some irrational exuberance in the writing down of bank assets – much of it because of quirks in the going accounting rules. Here’s how it reckons some assets are being assigned a lower value than they deserve.
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Catching Up With The Joneses
Article :
February 2008
Not content to watch its banking brethren (Morgan Stanley, Goldman, et cet) get all the gravy in that high-stakes investment playground we call Asia, JP Morgan is setting aside a chunk of change for the region, in addition to taking on a private-equity team from Hong Kong. Here’s its master plan for making a bundle.
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And When We Say ‘Good News,’ We Don’t Mean The Bible
Article :
February 2008
We mean the bank that did the impossible: post fourth-quarter earnings. Hallelujah and glory be. That said, it couldn’t have done it without the help of two key contributors.
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Deutsche’s Dilemma?
Article :
February 2008
Deutsche Bank’s bets against U.S. subprime mortgages may have allowed it to duck the record losses of UBS, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, but the ensuing slowdown in the debt markets may soon come back to haunt it.
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Foiled By E-Mail…Again
Article :
February 2008
Just as the SEC kicks off a probe of Société Générale (investigating, as we understand it, stock sales of a certain board member in the run-up to news of the bank’s breathtaking losses last month) e-mails between SocGen and the exchange that attempted to red-flag its suspect trades are now coming to light. Sadly, the communiques don’t exactly paint the bank as overly vigilant. In fact, depending on how you look at them, you might even describe Soc’s attitude as wholly cavalier. But don’t take our word for it. Judge for yourselves.
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Down Under
Posting :
Ann Lee
:
01/23/2008
Heath Ledger’s sudden death put a slight damper to the opening night dinner of G’day USA which kicked off Australian Week here in New York.
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Winners Take It All
Article :
January 2008
A smattering of monster-to-midsize banks brandishing healthy balance sheets and a newfound appetite for bargain-hunting in the wake of the subprime disaster may be at the heart of a new flurry of megadeals on the horizon. But which targets are banks such as J.P. Morgan and Goldman most likely to go after? Say no more; we have your cheat sheet here – plus a sneak preview of how the rapidly changing landscape likely will lead to at least a few dust-ups for the weaker links of private equity.
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