After turning down a shot at buying all of Lehman Brothers over the weekend, British bank Barclays just picked up the core of the investment bank for $250 million. It spent another $1.5 billion to buy Lehman’s New York headquarters building and a couple of data centers. You read that right: the buildings went for six times more than the …

The Reserve, the company that invented money market funds, just announced that its $62 billion Primary Fund is going to break the buck–that is, be valued at less than the usual $1 a share. The reason: Lehman’s bankruptcy. To quote the Dow Jones newswire story:

New York money manager the Reserve said Tuesday that its Primary Fund is

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TIME’s Bobby Ghosh just chatted with Prince Alwaleed bin Talal today. Does the Prince, who made a fortune betting on troubled Citicorp in 1991 but lately has been seeing mostly losses on that investment, have any plans to ride to the rescue of the U.S. financial sector?

TIME: Would you buy now?

Alwaleed: No, I think we have enough

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Perhaps I hyperbolize, but it’s still interesting to note—as esteemed business editor Bill Saporito just did to me and Justin—that B of A issued the first private mortgage-backed security. Bill was reading a paper about the resiliency of mortgage-backed securities when collateralized-debt-obligation markets are disrupted (timely!) …

Silly me, I thought it was a good thing that Hank Paulson insisted on more or less wiping out the shareholders of Fannie and Freddie. But now the estimable Anatole Kaletsky of The Times makes the counterargument:

By deciding essentially to wipe out shareholders in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and acting even more harshly to the

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That Q&A I mentioned yesterday is now on Time.com. I talk about what happens to your insurance policy at AIG if the company declares bankruptcy, what happens if your mortgage lender goes belly up, and other good stuff.

Barbara!

Australian money manager John Hempton offers the clearest explanation of AIG’s predicament that I’ve seen:

The core business – the US Domestic Broker Group (DBG) is the best diversified primary insurance company in the US. … There are other OK businesses in there.

The good businesses generate about 20 billion per year pre-tax. That

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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 of

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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, as has …

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 the habit of doing—but when he went to the …