Analysts at Facebook’s lead underwriter, Morgan Stanley, have set a price target of $38 on newly-public Facebook’s stock — …
Wall Street & Markets
After Facebook Debacle, Can Investors Trust the IPO Process?
It’s been over a month since Facebook’s troubled initial public offering, and the fallout continues to reverberate from Wall Street to Capitol Hill. Angry shareholders have filed over 40 lawsuits against Facebook, its …
Will JPMorgan’s $2 Billion Blunder Finally End ‘Too Big to Fail’?
JPMorgan’s $2 billion bungled trade has severely damaged the reputation of its CEO Jamie Dimon and vaporized nearly $20 billion in shareholder value. But will it lead to the kind of enhanced Wall Street regulation many experts …
Bulldoze: The New Way to Foreclose
UPDATED (5:29 PM)
Banks have a new remedy for America’s ailing housing market: bulldozers.
There are nearly 1.7 million homes in the U.S. in some state of foreclosure. Banks already own some of these homes and will soon repossess many more. Many housing economists worry that a near constant stream of home sales by banks could keep …
Did Lobbying Cause the Financial Crisis?
The HBO docu-drama Too Big To Fail and the book by Adam Ross Sorkin by the same title are billed as the defining history of the financial crisis. But it may be time to rewrite history again.
Recently, there has been some griping about financial lobbying because it seems the big banks are attempting to roll back every regulatory change …
Is the Home Foreclosure Crisis Ending?
Foreclosures have been holding back the housing market for some time. It’s one of the reasons housing prices have continued to sag, long after many predicted a rebound. But recently there has been some news that seems to suggest a light at the end of the housing bust tunnel. The number of completed foreclosures has been dropping …
Foreclosures: Are Bank Regulators Messing Up the Housing Recovery?
Foreclosures are down. Time to celebrate? Not really. Realtytrac, which monitors foreclosures, says the number of people losing their homes is dropping not because people are having fewer financial problems but because banks are taking longer to process foreclosures. And that’s not because they are modifying loans and helping people stay …
Why Banks are Charging $5 for ATM Withdrawls
You may soon be paying more at the teller (Photo: Getty Images)
Earlier this year, JPMorgan Chase began to charge its customers in New York $1 if they wanted to get a printed account statement from the ATM. Thank you very much, I’ll just guess. But it turns out this may have been the opening salvo in Chase’s chase after new fees. …
Will “Foreclosure-gate” Cost the Banks Billions?
Protests of banks’ foreclosure practices are getting new attention (Shannon Stapleton/REUTERS)
The banks’ tab from the housing bust is set to get a lot bigger.
In the past few weeks, state attorneys general and lawyers representing borrowers in danger of losing their homes have uncovered a number of certainly dubious, potentially …
ATM Crime: More and more Machines Get Withdrawn
Smash and grab ATM theft is this recession’s hip crime (Getty images)
Call it the total ATM withdrawal. In the past year, as the economic slump has dragged on, robbers around the country are increasingly trying a new method to get their hands on cash. They’re no longer swiping stolen cards in automated teller machines. More and more …
Bank Profits: How $6 billion is Bad News?
You would expect a very basic rule of the stock market to be that earnings are good. Yet this morning after two of the biggest banks in the nation Citigroup and Bank of America reported nearly $6 billion in earnings, not only did the shares of those two companies drop, but so did the whole market. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was …
A Stock Rally Built on Financial Reform?
Stocks are rallying today in the wake of very little positive news. So some are clinging to the one piece of news that can be spun. The financial reform bill is good for banks and their profits. Yes, State Street did pre-report good profits. But most banks are projected to have falling profits in the second quarter. The real market …