The WSJ, on the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s decision on severance packages of Fannie Mae’s Daniel Mudd and Freddie Richard Syron: Mr. Mudd’s pension and 401k plan has an estimated current value of $5.6 million, the official said, and for Mr. Syron the figure is $4 million. But the FHFA won’t allow additional severance payments [...]
It all began with the ratings agencies giving their AAA imprimatur to collateralized debt obligations built atop vast mounds of suspect mortgages. And now the crisis is deepening with S&P and Moody’s yanking away ratings at the most inopportune times, as they both did Monday night to insurer AIG. My first temptation is to yell, [...]
This evening I was talking to someone from Lehman’s research department and I asked about his day at work. He was surprisingly calm, asking what good it would do to get upset. He said he got an email yesterday to come to work today. So he rode his bike in from Brooklyn—as he’s gotten into [...]
Nouriel Roubini has gotten a lot of attention over the past few days for his prediction that no independent broker-dealers (a.k.a. investment banks) will survive the current financial crisis. The only two big ones left are Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, and their stocks both sank much more than the overall market Monday. But there [...]
You can find lots of people arguing now that CEO Dick Fuld‘s hubris led to the collapse of Lehman Brothers. It may well have been a factor, but the flip side is that Dick Fuld’s hubris was instrumental in resurrecting Lehman in 1994 from its long dormancy as a subsidiary of American Express. As Roddy [...]
The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas just sent around some numbers that put the thousands of jobs being lost at Lehman into context. Annual Financial Sector Job Cuts in the US 1997-2008 1997— 37,159 1998— 62,366 1999— 60,834 2000— 55,272 2001— 116,647 2002— 89,210 2003— 51,784 2004— 97,945 2005— 50,503 2006— 50,327 2007— 153,105 [...]
I just wrote a quick TIME.com article on the Wall Street fun. And for those of you don’t come via the TIME.com homepage, I’m reproducing the whole thing here: There’s been talk of a potential failure of Lehman Brothers for months, and the investment bank already had a near-death experience in 1998.Merrill Lynch has been [...]
U.S. stock indices dropped markedly (but less than European ones had earlier in the day) as markets opened this morning. Since then they’ve been flat to up. What does that mean? That the crowds that set market prices don’t think the apocalypse is upon us. Now I’m not as convinced of the wisdom of such [...]
That’s one question my mother had last night. I’m going to try to answer those sorts of consumer/personal finance questions throughout the day, so let me know what you’re wondering. Not just about Merrill and Bank of America, but also about the other companies in the news—Lehman, AIG—or bigger-picture issues like what happens to your [...]
It’s on Seventh Ave., not Wall Street, of course. But here, as part of my continuing bold effort to never win any photography awards ever, is a picture I snapped of Lehman HQ on the way to work this morning:
