The headline number from Citigroup’s second-quarter earnings release—$4.3 billion—is pretty staggering. Goldman Sachs only made $3.4 billion; JP Morgan Chase $2.7 billion. And those are the well-managed banks.
Then you read to the second line of the earnings release and see that Citi booked a gain of $6.7 billion, after taxes, …
When I saw the headline on my RSS reader it brought back all sorts of tech-bubble memories: F-Secure Pays €27.5 Million For French Storage Startup Steek, it read. Continued the TechCrunch Europe post:
Finnish computer security provider F-Secure has acquired venture-backed French startup Steek for €27.5M in cash with the possibility
…
Thanks to the persistence and assistance of commenter audiospaceship, I finally read the samizdat version of Matt Taibbi’s Goldman Sachs screed. (Rolling Stone only posted excerpts, and while I may still go out and buy a print copy, I wouldn’t be able to link to it.) I generally liked it, and I actually learned a bunch from the section …
Okay, so maybe that’s not entirely fair. The SEC has signed off on some new rules and proposed some additional ones to try to temper conflict of interest at the companies that told us all those new-fangled mortgage-related securities were unlikely to ever go bad. Oops! And now SEC head Mary Schapiro is talking about yet another batch of …
Goldman Sachs reported earnings this morning, and it reported lots of them—$3.44 billion in the quarter ending June 26. That’s well more than the $2.33 billion Goldman’s made in the comparable quarter in 2007, back before the world started falling apart. In other words, Goldman may be emerging from this crisis in a better position than …
I read most of The Hobbit last night. I’d been reading it in very small chunks to Curious Capitalist Jr. over the past few months. He’s perfectly capable of reading it himself, but didn’t seem to want to, so I started reading it to him. Yesterday we dropped CC Jr. off at summer camp, so I figured I’d read ahead in the book—which I read …
There have been two main theories of why things went so wrong at General Motors. One is that the company is run by a bunch of ingrown retreads with no sense of where the automotive business was headed. The other is that the company’s management has been so burdened by commitments (to pensions, to retiree health care, to union work rules) …
Writes Tom Lauricella in a fascinating article in today’s WSJ:
Asset allocation, a bedrock of investing for decades, appeared to fail miserably in 2008. The conviction shared by most investors — that they should spread their money across myriad asset classes to minimize losses — was shaken as nearly all markets tumbled in unison.
The …
A TARP chronology:
Sept. 17, 2008: Lehman Brothers has just gone under, the financial world seems to be collapsing under our ears, and Nick Brady, Gene Ludwig and Paul Volcker propose in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that the only thing that can save us is a “mechanism in place to remove” toxic real estate assets from the financial …
The news yesterday that John Meriwether had shut down his latest hedge fund, JWM Partners, wasn’t exactly news. Word got out back in February that the man behind legendary blowup Long-Term Capital Management was again in trouble, albeit of a less spectacular sort than 11 years ago (JWM’s main fund was down 44% from September 2007 through …
Watching Congressional hearings on important topics always seems beforehand like it’s going to be a good idea. You know: Our elected representatives, asking the experts (or the culprits) the questions that need to be asked. Every once in a while it does work out this way: I thought the Senate Banking Committee’s hearings on the banking …
Microlending was one of the biggest parties in finance in recent years—an era of many parties. A new report out from the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation (CSFI) details how things have changed over the past year-and-a-half. The report is based on a survey of 430 institututions in 82 countries and reveals that what’s …
