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 Boyd and Allan Sloan put it in the …
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
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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
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 crowds as some people, but I do take …
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:
When my colleague Jyoti Thottam wrote this profile of Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis in January, we used the headline “The Savior of Countrywide?”
Guess we can drop the “Countrywide” and question mark.
Here’s B of A’s rundown about how big and bad it is, now that it’s swallowing Merrill Lynch:
The combined company would have leadership
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Was deregulation a factor in bringing us to our financial system to its current teetering state? Yeah, sure. But the deregulatory decision most often cited by lefty (and not so lefty) observers–the 1999 repeal of the Depression-era Glass Steagall Act that had separated depositary banking from investment banking–is actually looking …
It seemed like a normal enough Sunday in New York, if way too muggy for September. There was the Book Festival in downtown Brooklyn, the Feast of San Gennaro in Little Italy, International Pickle Day on the Lower East Side, the Ice Cream Run in the Village.
And way downtown at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a few blocks behind …
In an interview with Reuters, PIMCO CEO Mohamed El-Erian sums up the day’s events so far quite nicely: “In today’s highly disrupted financial markets, the unthinkable is thinkable.”
He was playing off the news of a rare, emergency trading session Sunday afternoon to let Wall Street derivatives dealers reduce their exposure to Lehman …
It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon here in New York and downtown the Who’s Who of high finance are racing to come up with a plan to deal with Lehman Brothers. Here’s the latest (as of about noon), from the New York Times:
The fate of Lehman Brothers, the beleaguered investment bank, hung in the balance on Sunday as Federal Reserve officials
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